" Wrote in message:
On 05/07/2018 14:50, Jim Chisholm wrote:
On 05/07/2018 11:28, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 09:58:26 on Thu, 5 Jul
2018, Graeme Wall remarked:

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-44721415

I smell a rat.
Of course it could be a rat (probably fried)
&
I bet a lot of equipment cabinets are not designed to dissipate the sort
of heat we currently have. I remember building simple circuits and
seeing how tolerant they were to both low and high temperatures as they
were to be in a field.

I wonder how often failures like this occur in India due to heat?

We do have hot summers and cold winters -- perhaps not to the same
degree and length, respectively, as India and Russia, but nonetheless we
are hit with weather extremes.

The 'normal' annual range here is about 60c, from lows at around -20c in winter to highs of around 40c in summer. A couple of years ago we had an absolute stinker of a winter and they recorded a low of -33 in Brasov; last summer it was crazy hot, notable not so much for the temperature ( 40c, but that's to be expected at least a day or two every year) but that it was that easy for days at a time. Somewhat concerned this year could be a repeat - when I left the house at 9.30 this morning it was already north of 31c by the weather station on my balcony :-).

Our datacentre has never had a cooling related outage ;-). Actually, thinking about it, it's never had an outage at all.


I am reminded though of a monumental cluster**** that happened to the Netherlands (Schipol) datacentre of a certain large satellite broadcaster while I was working there... Power was lost, so the generators kicked in and everything worked smoothly as planned. Until one of the power control units gave up in a shower of sparks. No problem, the backup was ok... Until 5 minutes later it did exactly the same thing. And the whole datacentre was down...

Root cause was sort-of aircon. The UPS+Power control kit was in shipping containers outside the datacentre, with their own cooling system. At some point this cooling system had failed, and an on-site genius had solved the problem by propping the doors of the containers open and letting fresh air do the job. This worked well enough that evidently nobody ever got round to fixing the aircon...

The problem wasn't that the power control units overheated. It was that moist (salty, being right next to the North Sea) spray/moisture had been getting into to the power control unit all the time those doors had been propped open, corroding the circuit boards, and leading to both units failing identically one after the other...






--