As anyone with any knowledge of physics knows energy can never be destroyed, this presents a problem for those of us working in the wonderful world of .  Computers use energy and then that energy is left hanging around as heat, obviously this heat has to be dissapated somehow.  For a common desktop this task is performed by a combination of heatsinks and fans, in the realm of the server things become a little more challenging…

For a start, servers are normally in a rack, in a room all on their own, rack servers have a lot less free space inside them for air to move so the chassis itself contains a fantastic brute force collection of fans sucking in at the front and pushing out at the rear.  Great right?  But where does this heat go when its left the server?  In a well configured its sucked out by some sort of system whilst is blown in by the same system.

This of course is in a well configured system, in the room that its currently my task to maintain the process of keeping the servers cool involves an inadequate air con unit, 2 floor standing fans and a portable unit.  This is because the people who put in failled to communicate at all and so now rather than out room running at a relatively chilly 19 degrees its a far warmer 34.  Thus pushing the temperature of the servers up and resulting i the newest addition to our server rack overheating and shutting down 5 times in the past week.

Discussions are currently on going on the subject of replacing the current unit but until those discussions reach some kind of conclusion every so often I have no other choice but to swear, walk into the room and hit the reset button.  This is followed by a 15 minute wait as first the hypervisor reboots and then the 6 virtual machines power on.

The upside to this is I have made some cash out of …

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