“Cranking up the thermostat in existing data centers is not engineering or new technology. It’s just being cheap and cutting corners while putting your customers at risk.”

Actually, in my experience, most datacenters are running in such a way that the supply air to many/most servers is at the bottom or below the bottom of the ASHRAE and manufacturers levels, because people don’t manage their airflow well. If people would just use blanking panels, deploy decent hot and cold aisle isolation, grommeted tiles, etc, then having a *consistent* supply air temp of 65F to all servers (even if the return air temp is say 90F) is much better than having some servers at 55F just to make sure the ‘hot server’ at the ‘top of the rack’ gets 70F air. And when you can manage air flow and temperature like that, you can raise the chilled water setpoint 2 or 4 degrees and gain 5-10% efficiency on your chillers, and you can raise the average return air temps, letting your CRACs or AHUs operate with no or at least less dehumidification losses and a higher delta T, giving you more gains on that side. Yes, if you run around with a thermometer, your ‘coldest’ supply air temp is now ‘higher’ than the ‘coldest’ supply air temp used to be, but *all* of the servers would be in the proper range, and the savings on energy will pay for the panels, grommets, and all the other things that were bought. Also, redundancy is easier to manage, as you know where the air is going to go when you do have a CRAC fail or a AHU shut down, as opposed to a data center with a solution of “Just throw more and colder air out there” which experiences completely unexpected and seemingly random hotspots during PMs o r unit outages. At the end of the day, if you’re cranking up your thermostat *for the right reasons*, you’re more likely to be taking care of both your gear and the customers, *and* saving money and resources.

“While my standard 65F may be excessive, it proved Robert Chase’s point several weeks ago when a chiller failure (pump impeller fracture) took the chiller down for 6 hours.”

I’d say the cause of failure here wouldn’t be the room’s starting temperature, but the fact you had no redundancy. Assuming a Lead/Lag/Standby configuration, if lead and lag are running side by side, on a fault by lead, standby should startup, lag should become lead and standby become lag, in seconds or at worst minutes. Same for chillers, etc. If your cooling architecture goes away for multiple *hours* after a single device failure (of something other than an actual pipe rupture, say, on a single loop site), a change of setpoint seems the least of the worries.

Most Blade center chassis’s come standard with redundant blower modules and the management module is capable of speeding up the fans on the 2nd blower module and throttling the CPU’s to make up for the lost blower until a replacement is installed. You would have to loose a first blower module and ignore it for your scenario to be a real issue. Even a closet sized room would take more than 90 seconds to reach a critical temperature if the room lost cooling. Power module and management module failures are more likely to take out a blade based chassis.

I agree with you somewhat about every scenario being different, but thermodynamics and redundancy works the same in every data center regardless of what kind of equipment you have installed. Real Engineers leave room in their calculations for unforeseen events to occur without affecting availability.

Raising temperatures increases your risk of overheating your servers only if your datacenter design and HVAC design can float through HVAC outages for any significant period of time. If you lose your blowers, a 30 KW rack of blade servers will overheat and shut down in 60 seconds at 90F, or 90 seconds at 70F. Will you really be able to respond differently between seconds 61 and 90? How critical are those servers?

You need to pay attention to design, risks, and potential power savings or increases. That’s called engineering. There are no cut and dried answers.

Why not an underground facility? The temperature is (generally) constant year-round. Or build in cooler climates?

Solar energy is the overall solution. We have to get serious about solar.

Companies like Google push the envelope and do a lot of hardware work in their data center but to their credit they are doing some true engineering rather than just second guessing the engineers at their hardware vendor.

Cranking up the thermostat in existing data centers is not engineering or new technology. It’s just being cheap and cutting corners while putting your customers at risk.