• U. of Penn Data Center Overheats

    • By: Rich Miller
      January 20th, 2010

    As data centers get warmer, the environment gets less forgiving. That lesson was learned the hard way at the University of Pennsylvania, which on Tuesday had to shut off the IT systems supporting the school’s financial, research and student services.

    The University Data Center experienced “an excessive heat condition” on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. The incident occurred when one of the two glycol pumps supporting the Data Center was accidentally switched from automatic to manual during an equipment replacement, resulted in overheating.

    About

    Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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    Phil

    Posted January 21st, 2010

    looks like the unemployment rate just went up just a little bit more.

    Friday data center tidbits. « The Server Room

    Posted January 22nd, 2010

    [...] } First up today is the story about the University of Pennsylvania overheating its data center due to human error. What can we all take away from this fiasco? Don’t mess with equipment that you don’t [...]

    Jon

    Posted January 26th, 2010

    Did these folks not have temperature monitoring in place to alert them of increasing temperatures? Couldn’t they have just turned the pump back on. Sounds like a lack of communication as well. I hope everything is good now.

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