Once, about three years ago, I was part of a team fixing the datacentres for a big mobile phone company. When we got to the the centre, it was a mess, dead, unused boxes everywhere drawing power, racks with only one server in them, you name it. The peach though, was the power distribution board for the biggest of the centres. This thing supplied power for every box in the place, and was running so hot that you could actually fry an egg on the top (we measured it at about 82 C). But what was absolute genius was how they kept it ticking over. They had a portable air-conditioning unit shoved up against it. Which was plugged in to the same board it was cooling.
Oh, yeah, this was the main datacentre for over ten million customers, which was 100 metres away from the 'disaster recovery' backup sites. Both were on a floodplain.
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Once, about three years ago, I was part of a team fixing the datacentres for a big mobile phone company. When we got to the the centre, it was a mess, dead, unused boxes everywhere drawing power, racks with only one server in them, you name it. The peach though, was the power distribution board for the biggest of the centres. This thing supplied power for every box in the place, and was running so hot that you could actually fry an egg on the top (we measured it at about 82 C). But what was absolute genius was how they kept it ticking over. They had a portable air-conditioning unit shoved up against it. Which was plugged in to the same board it was cooling. Oh, yeah, this was the main datacentre for over ten million customers, which was 100 metres away from the 'disaster recovery' backup sites. Both were on a floodplain.