There is obvious economic incentive to letting things heat up. What a lot of folks haven't been taking into consideration, at least until facing the realities of newfound budget constraints forced their hand, is the fact that most of these servers, and the individual components within them, are a lot more environmentally tolerant, and a lot less finicky, than their predecessors, which came with oppressively narrow recommended windows of operation to maximize MTBF. The days of needing low (but not too low!) humidity combined with the most reasonably-chilled air available are falling behind us.

It's not just the bean-counters that need to be kept happy. Being seen as good corporate citizens is becoming increasingly important to many companies.


Google's custom servers, living by the thousands in shipping containers, seem to be, if not the leading edge, at least, err, trucking along in that direction. Their research into what would be considered high-temperature data center operations (from 85 to 114 degrees Farenheit), at least in the hard drive realm, shows "modest increases" in disk failure, with the largest attrition figures among new drives, and those more than five years old -- in other words, the drives in the two life stages where failures are going to be most frequent (whether this represents excess or accelerated mortality, the Googlers doing the study were reluctant to say).

Beyond simple component life is the move towards virtualization, and the concentration of more tasks on fewer boxes, which, while it sounds like a good thing on the surface (fewer machines running = less juice required), it complicates server room airflow needs. If you consolidate five racks' worth of processing into two, you don't need the A/C blowing on your three standby racks, cooling rigs that aren't even on, and you've just cut your room's cooling needs in half... but you've engineered the room to handle all that extra equipement. D'oh.

Yes, hardware overkill is hardly the biggest sin in our world, but overspending isn't going to make too many folks happy. We like making happy people. It takes our mind off the fact that Ghostbusters shipped without any frigging multi-player capability.

There is no Data. Only Cuul.

Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Wheel. Those of you wishing to inflict or solicit hardware and gaming geekery in person can catch him volunteering at Dragon*Con. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.