Hot stuff - 40 Deg C

[#1]

Servers are running hotter nowadays. http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240231563/Lenovo-releases-new-servers-that-can-run-at-45-degrees...
Though I don't think the Operators would be so keen on the environment.

[#2]

I remember when the cooling failed in our mini data centre. Room temp was 40+. Servers were powering off, rebooting and generally misbehaving.
I got a bollocking for downing the main server before it fell over, management don't understand do they?

[#3]

I had to deal with one of those cases where the air conditioning failed. There'd been some routine "preventative"  maintenance and a door panel had not been latched properly. Vibration had sprung the door open triggering a safety micro switch that turned off the air conditioning. The maintenance was on the the Thursday before Easter. By pure chance I visited the computer room on the Saturday and was able to power down and to call in the operations to recover the system before start of business on the Tuesday. If I'd not made that call the company would have gone bust and 600 people would have lost their jobs. The temperature in the computer room was off the chart.
I still remember the sound of the large hard drives running down in otherwise total silence after I triggered the EPO button.

[#4]

do you think this is a move to make data centres cheaper to run without resorting to the measures Facebook announced a few years ago where there new centre was to be built inside the arctic circle where they could use fresh air cooling for the building saving thousands of pounds a day, a move other companies have also suggested they would look to make as they design more green compliant facilities ?

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-launches-arctic-data-centre-i...
"hot" running servers would in theory allow them to be continue building data centres in more temperate areas like the UK and USA without needing the excessive cooling of the past whilst not loosing the capabilities ....
I'd rather they were investigating another option though like building systems that were self cooling so the room didn't require such monstrous power requirements but I guess that would be too expensive to get running in a short time frame

[#5]

It's more a case of: the newer servers are more powerful while taking less power, more will be moving to virtualisation and combining servers into one box, that takes less power than the others, this results in less cooling needed so it is cheaper to run in environmental terms as well.
When I last worked in a server environment, the fad was for small ff (1U) servers doing one job, as I left it was for large (6-8U) servers doing the work of 8-10 servers. Now there are modular servers where you can plug in a cage that will handle 4-6 servers on one plug, and you can put 4 in the main chassis. That and hdd's getting larger, I worked on servers who's hdd's were 3-5*4Gb or 2x2Gb + 3*9Gb and they were considered high powered then, now it would be disk arrays in the Tb classes.

[#6]

and often there running them in newer servers as ssd's thus reducing more heat dissipation problems ...
but you still have the problem of how to get rid of the generated heat to keep the machine cool enough to run at optimal performance, in the past this has meant some room with a complete air control system and very non eco refrigerant filled units, this new hot server tech will allow them to use less environmentally harmful cooling solutions without needing to relocate to the sub zero temps of the arctic or Antarctic to achieve the lower temps,
but surely there would be a better way of achieving the cooling needed without running things at higher temps whilst still being more environmentally friendly

[#7]

Water cooling, but no one wants lots of water round the server farm.
My mate used to work on a laser cutter, the unit was water cooled, DI water ran over it & through it, no need for heat sinks.

[#8]

In the good old days (?) when PC servers started to take over from mini-computers each department would own its own servers and demand space for them in the data centre.  These servers were woefully underutilised running at about 5% capacity, they also took up a lot of physical space. Data Centre costs started to rocket. People then realised servers taking just 1U (approx 1 inch) of vertical rack space would take less physical space. So increasing numbers of this were crammed into the data centre racks to meet processing demands. They were still under utilised, at around 5%, but more machines in the same space started to increase the heat load in the room. Data Centres were finding they had to increase the cooling capacity of their air conditioning plant. Previously you'd expect 2-3 KWatts / square metre  of floor space cooling requirement. As the number of servers in the space increased the cooling load rocketed. At one point I was designing for 20 KW per square metre in trading floor data centre rooms.
Some of this was alleviated by the introduction of Virtual Machines, where you might take the load from 10 boxes and run it on one powerful server, but as the workload on the powerful server grew so did the heat output. You need a lot of energy to run air conditioning and maintain low (20 Deg C) air temperatures. It was getting to the point where the Power overhead for a data centre was 100% of the actual server demands.  (PUE of 2).  The carbon cost of this extra power is quite high. 100KW hours represents a power station burning one tonne of coal to generate the energy which in in turn generates a couple of tonnes of CO2.  So efforts are mounting to reduce the amount of energy used to run a data centre (Google manages about PUE 1.2).
If you use Free Air Cooling the only power used is to power the fans to circulate the air. This works better in colder climates, but this is not always convenient to the business location. An alternative is to run the data centre equipment at higher temperatures, it reduces the amount of power needed to provide cooling. 45 Deg C as to 20 Deg C). Water cooling is more efficient than air, but people don't want water next to circuit boards, Liquid CO2 is seven times better at removing heat compared with water, but need 50 atmosphere pressure. A growing trend is to use electrically inert fluids to provide immersion cooling.

[#9]

Other companies may apply.....

[#10]

yeah I've seen the mineral oil "fish tanks"  used by some firms, but they also bring more problems with maintenance, I'm surprised that some sort of power cooling solution hasn't been derived though, there's plenty of "old" tech out there like forced air cooling which utilise little more than thermal dynamics to remove heat build up in a room, like how Victorian houses had larder rooms that were always much cooler than the kitchen they were located next to, makes you wonder if the push for "new" old ways of proper design have been forgotten.
certainly repurposing existing space would require new methods but surely when building from the ground up the old and established methods would be far better ....