Some Don’t Like It Hot

mid-afternoon on Saturday, the 28th of June 2008 by Chad

Steven Den Beste is worried his server can’t handle the heat that he’s getting.

Long time ago I was a contract sys-admin for a nuke plant in south east Pennsylvania. It was a nice cold day in February, about 18 inches of snow on the ground. That’s when the heating system that fed the area of the building that held our server room decided to get stuck on full blast.

We had about 30-35 OS2 servers, lots of external full height 1gig drives (I said this was a long time ago!) in the center of the building on the third floor. We opened the one door to the room, had a fan going full blast, but couldn’t do much. The windows wouldn’t open on that floor of course.

It hit 115F in that server room. Being a nuke plant, we couldn’t just turn everything off unfortunately. So I’m on the phone with IBM asking a tech rep just how hot the servers could handle. They said at 85F ambient they’d recommend shutting down. I explained why we couldn’t shut down, and about every 10 minutes you’d hear the whirring grind of another drive biting it permanently.

We lost 18 drives that day before they were able to get the power to the heating system just shut down. Lots of restores the next few days!