Posted on 09/15/2022 7:45:02 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
“It should make no difference what the temperature outside is.”
Datacenter cooling and pretty much all infrastructure influenced by weather is designed based on percentiles of temperature in that region. Typically no more than for a day that happens 0.1-0.4% of the time. So on average you will have an outage of one day every 1-3 years depending how much much the owner wants to invest and how much they lose with outages.
Of course for “mission critical” systems the sky is the limit and the owner might spend 3-4x more on cooling alone to ensure no shutdowns. Thankfully Twitter does not fall under this category...
For reference, the Sacramento 90th percentile for max temp on Sept 8 is about 98 degrees. It’s a tough economic justification to design for ten hours of 113 F.
You are better off with data center diversity (which they had).
Thanks.
Apparently, these data farms are common in rural Virginia and W. Virginia.
So they are vulnerable when extreme heat hits those areas.
Thanks for sharing your real world history and replies.
Thanks, for your real life posts and comments on this critical issue.
lol.
“potentially perilous position.”
I know — that cracked me up. Maybe “perilous” if you are a shareholder. But somehow the rest of the world would suffer through a Twitter outage. It would be hard, but I think we could struggle through.
Just curious. I’ve read the whole thread and did not see any reference to how many KW the cooling system would have to dissipate. I saw a video about am radio station WLW which ran with a power power output of 500,000 watts. There was a picture of the transmitter building somewhere out in the boonies and it had a huge pool with fountains. My first thought was why go through all the trouble to put in huge fountains sure nobody is going to see them except for a few cows. Then the light-bulb wend off over my head and I realized that this was the cooling system for the transmitter.
880 kW = 3 million BTU/hour = 250 tons of cooling. For reference, our house AC unit is 2 tons for 3,400 sq feet.
I think "Windows" refers to the solar heat load generated by windows.
A 3,000 sq ft data center is a small one, too, and consumes less than a megaWatt. The world's biggest data centers are range from one million square feet to ten million square feet and consume hundreds of megaWatts.
I’ve been in a datacenter that had power failure where the generators didn’t kick in and everything was running on battery. With the CRAC units out, the temperature climbed rapidly — much faster than I would have imagined. It went from cold to sauna in minutes until the battery banks were exhausted and everything started shutting down.
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