Environment monitoring

[Robert G. Brown]

On 30 Sep 2003, Dean Johnson wrote:

> Bummer about the AC. You might want to go and check your backups and
> backup mechanism with a renewed zeal. Based on past experience you are
> in for an "interesting" near future. While they came back just fine, I
> wouldn't expect them to last very long after experiencing that high of
> temp. 

Geeze, I forgot to add one more comment.  We had just been talking about
the time required for a server room to "get hot" upon the AC shutting
down.  Today was AC filter changing day here.  Shut down blower unit
(but not cluster) for about 7 minutes.  In a room with at least 30 KW
sustained, roughly 4 meters x 10 meters, ambient temperature rose
perhaps 10F, just barely perceptibly (to maybe 75F) by the time the AC
came back on -- warmer immediately behind a rack, of course.

Lots of air, not that efficient a thermal transfer, lots of thermal
ballast to absorb the heat.

   rgb

> 
> 	-Dean
> 
> On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 14:15, Mitchel Kagawa wrote:
> > This past Friday night after everyone in the office went home our AC, for
> > our small 64 node cluster, decided to have a compressor problem and stop
> > producing cool air.  On Sat I get a phone call saying that one of our users
> > can't access his e-mail (server is also in cluster room).  I wasn't able to
> > get to the office until Sunday afternoon and I wasn't able to log into the
> > head node to shut everything down remotely. By the time I was able to get to
> > the cluster all but 20 nodes had shut themselves down because the ambient
> > temperature of the room reached 145 deg.  Thankfully all the servers, raid
> > arrays and all but 2 nodes came back up when I hit the power button (after I
> > got the temp back to 68).  Our stupid ac doesn't have the communications
> > package that cost an extra $5000 cause my company's too cheap to spring for
> > it and an extra phone line.  So I was wondering if anyone used one of those
> > environment monitoring appliances that e-mail you (before stuff starts
> > shutting off) if a temp goes out of a set range or if it detects water, high
> > humidity, or movement in the room?  I'm looking at a NetBotz/RackBots here
> > (http://www.netbotz.com/products/rack.html) and was wondering if anyone has
> > any experience with them or if you have any other (inexpensive <$2000)
> > suggestions.  Thanks for any help.
> > 
> > Mitchel Kagawa
> > 
> > 
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Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu



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