BBC NEWS | Technology | Mixed results for green IT goals.
Nice new BBC news article, about how the majority of govt~ IT managers don’t know that they’re supposed to be reducing their carbon footprint.
One of the hints is that the “proliferation” of “air conditioning of server rooms” (among other things) is the cause.
I’d like to see you run a datacentre (tonns of computer servers, really big pipe to the internet etc) without airconditioning. If we turn ours off for 10 minutes, the temperature gets swealtering. 30 minutes and old harddrives start failing. Dumb.
but at the very least i think some investigation could be done into passive cooling and other methods of reducing the heat while saving on the air conditioning load.
Not really.. not with current server hardware. They all produce heat, and that has to go somewhere. The humidity control and air-filtration is really useful as well – dust really doesn’t help computer’s temperature…
You are telling me. Even a handful of racks can cause a massive amount of heat. One company I worked for had the main cooling unit, of course it was the one that fed the server room, go out in the dead of August and the room quickly became unbearable. It remained out for the better part of two weeks and we had to open up the room and set up series of fans to exhaust as much heat as we could from the room. Within the day we were doing rolling blackouts shutting down half the servers for a given period of time to reduce the ambient heat but also to let them cool down. Dress code for that time was shorts and flip-flops.