Apr 10 2007
So summer is coming, how do I know, well most of the snow has melted, and chances are we won’t get any more blizzards (the joys of living in the great white north, a.k.a. Canada). This year I don’t have to worry as much though. Worry about what you ask? Why my computer crashing of course.
A hot computer is an unhappy computer. My old system, a dual Athlon MP2000 ran at 59C at the best of times, and whenever the ambient temp hit over 30C it would start crashing when I hit the disk to hard (pushing the in case temp up enough to push it over the edge). Since then I have addressed the heating problem with a couple of obvious solutions, and some less obvious solutions. The first one was getting rid of the to 21″ IBM monitors I was using, although gorgeous they pumped out a ton of heat. Removing them dropped the room temperature 2 or 3 degrees on average. The second was to upgrade my network to gigabit from 100 megabit. This in turn allowed me to store files on my file server instead of locally, 100 megabit networks and large files are still an issue. Finally I got a new computer, with a single cooler CPU and a single hard drive to store the OS (all the data files having been moved to the basement where it is much cooler).
Now for the bad news (there’s always the bad news). You probably can’t do this in your server room (for one thing moving your data to a file server wouldn’t help if it’s still in the server room). Several sites have reported major shutdowns over the years due to air conditioning failures. This problem has become worse with the trend to higher density computing, especially blade servers. The good news is there are some trends in the opposite direction that may help, server consolidation using software such as VMWare allows sites to reduce the number of servers installed. Larger disk drives allow you to reduce the number of spindles, or conversely to increase the amount of storage without filling more racks. Finally Intel and AMD seem to have figured out that these systems need to be cooled, and that there are limits to most people’s air conditioning budgets.
Or you could just move to Canada where summer only lasts about 2 weeks.
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Posted by Kurt.Seifried on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007, at 2:35 am, and filed under Articles.
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