Getting disclaimers out of the way, this is Jody’s entry and the snowman was a creation in our yard from about two years ago. He was dubbed Mr. Cool Snow.
I’ve been tweeting and in email communication with districts today about temperatures in their data centers. I’ve walked into data centers that will take your breath away from the excessive heat and the general wisdom over the years has been that we need to have those servers operating in very cool conditions thanks to local cold room solutions services. I can recall walking in data centers that were noticeably cool (insert comments about meat lockers that inevitably follow). That was never a problem, as being tool cool certainly beats overheating the data center.
Today, though, that opinion probably needs to be revised. School districts are under pressure to save money and Kentucky helps districts develop energy management plans for schools and KSBA has had a School Energy Manager Project in place that has placed dozens of people in schools to assess and recommend ways to improve energy efficiency. We’ve talked about the pros and cons of turning off pieces of technology in the off-hours, but I haven’t heard as much about the data center itself. I’ll share some of what I shared with my school districts today:
For years, the general motto has been “the cooler, the better”. There are several more recent articles and opinions questioning that wisdom. Some of our major data center operators seem to be making pretty extreme changes. Articles I’ve read include:
- This article about a Facebook data center trying out an increase from 80°F to 85°F
- A Dell article with an engineer trying to find the ‘sweet spot’ optimum temperature
- Google’s “green energy czar” recommending an 80°F data center at a 2010 conference
There’s more to the story than these articles. Additional points worth mentioning include:
- Check your hardware and it’s tolerance for heat. Newer equipment has become more tolerant as servers have become more dense, but you certainly want to stay within your equipment’s proper operating range
- People – Some of you have staff members working near this equipment. A server may be able to tolerate 80 degrees all day, but your staff may not
- There’s a balance between A/C energy and fan energy. As the temperature increases, a server might “run fine” but may still increase its fan speed to avoid overheating. Some of these dense servers have fans that sound like an airplane leaving the runway, so the sound tolerance of the area should be considered. As the ‘sweet spot’ article states, there’s a point where you lose A/C energy savings because the servers take up more power to spin their fans at faster speeds
- As the data center temperature rises, this naturally means that you have less time to recover in the event of an incident or loss of cooling. This would have to be factored in as well
I think this is an area that’s worth evaluating if you’re a district technology leader. That doesn’t necessarily mean that anything should change. As the cautions above indicate, there are scenarios where leaving things as they are is the right move. However, I could see where a controlled, conditioned environment that is set to a really low temperature could at least consider turning the thermostat up a few degrees.