Making of the Open Architecture Network: Heat Rises
The Open Architecture Network has posted a "project" chronicling in photos the process of bringing this community online. Except for one particularly unflattering photo of me, there's a good sequence of photos of the SunFire X2200 M2 servers and Storagetek 3511 storage array racked in AMD's data center.
With all the available space in that rack why did we stick the shiny new gear at the bottom of the rack? In densely populated racks, servers mounted in the top half of the rack have as much as a 50% lower MTBF than servers in the bottom half. The working rule of thumb is for every 10o F above 68o the failure rate doubles. The gear that is typically most sensitive to high temperature is the power supply, hard drive, and fan. Good thing we've got two of each in these boxes, but I wouldn't expect a heat problem anyway - the cold air blowing on my head whilst working on these machines reminded me of winter in Duluth.
Resources for managing data center cooling:
