The part that I find most admins miss in the specs mentioned is the humidity. When you are running the A/C in a room almost constantly the humidity tends to drop fairly quickly. Once the humidity in your data center goes below 40% the chance of static electricity building starts to climb fast. I have yet to see it snow in a server room, but I have seen plenty of servers over the years taken out by a static charge. I run my centers at 71 degrees F and 50% humidity. TVK
From: Klint Price - ArizonaITPro [mailto:kpr...@arizonaitpro.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 4:41 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: PROPER OPERATING TEMPERATURES FOR SERVERS That depends. I operate a data center in Phoenix, and it gets plenty hot here. I was under the impression that a server room at 68 degrees was optimal, but when I conducted further research several months ago, it appears 85 degrees is just fine too assuming proper air flow, failovers, and architecture. Personally, I stick to 74 degrees or so because I have older equipment. I know Google runs at about 85 degrees, but they also use a commodity home-brew server per their own specs. Links: http://www.adc.com/Library/Literature/102264AE.pdf ASHRAE<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASHRAE>'s "Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments"[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center#cite_note-3> recommends a temperature range of 20-25 °C (68-75 °F) and humidity range of 40-55% with a maximum dew point of 17°C as optimal for data center conditions.[5]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center#cite_note-4> http://wistechnology.com/articles/4074/ "Because the average temperature [in data centers] will rise from the standard 68 [degrees Fahrenheit] to over 85 F in about 8.6 minutes when a problem arises from, for example, a power outage or an air-conditioning failure, the staff in charge must be alerted and take immediate action," Sigourney says. "With the critical shutdown threshold for most equipment is universally agreed to be at 85 F, the best response would be to use the automatic server shut-down capabilities included with AVTECH's PageR Enterprise software to eliminate risk by shutting down the most expensive and critical hardware when extreme conditions occur." and finally http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/03/23/will-server-warranties-get-hotter-too/ ________________________________ From: Murray Freeman [mfree...@alanet.org] Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 2:20 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: PROPER OPERATING TEMPERATURES FOR SERVERS Like many companies these days, we're looking to reduce our expenses. With the hot weather almost here in the Chicago area, I'm being asked to up the thermostat in our server room, to allow it to get warmer and thus save some money. We have been keeping the temperature around the mid 70's, and I'm concerned about higher temps in the server room causing servers to crash or at least reduce their lifetime. What od you think is the maximum operating temperature for a room with servers? We humans are not in the room that often, so it's strictly a case of a safe temperature for the hardware. There's no need to determine how many servers I have or how large the room is, just the temperature necessary to safely operate servers. Murray ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
