[rescue] Server rooms (was fire v210 upgrade)

[Hicheal Morton]

At my previous position, the server room was built inside a much larger
room.
The director of computer operations okayed a plan to place the air
conditioning unit for the server room ON TOP of the server room.
The air conditioning unit sat inside a drip tray with 1" lip with drainage
to the outside.
Unfortunately, the drip tray shifted from its original position and the
drainage hole was at the highest point of the drip tray.
One day, the security admin walked into the server room (to check his
personal p2p-type downloads) and discovered that on this bright and sunny
day, it was raining inside the server room.  (Quite an unusual--and funny
looking sight!)
We covered the racks of servers as best we could with the plastic sheets
that come is rolls for construction job that were laying about.
After covering the servers with plastic (and turning off the air
conditioner), the temperature in the server room sky-rocketed.
We set up fans to cool the servers under the plastic sheets.

What was the outcome?

The director of computer operations had a windowed door installed and
instructed us to ALWAYS look through the window when passing the server
room.  That way we would see when another rain storm occurred!
The director also bought some rolls of what he now called "server plastic"
to be draped over the servers in the even of another rain storm.
Whether he tried or not we do not know (he was quite a liar) but he told us
that the director of facilities refused to moved the air conditioning unit
from the top of the server room.

The company was a cable tv retailer.  All orders, inventories, broadcast,
web-sites, training, financial processes, hr processes, and process controls
were totally dependent the server in the server room.  If the servers died
the company would die.

Long Live the "Server Plastic"

Oh, one final thing.  Had not the security admin checked on his downloads,
enough of the servers would have fried and the remaining, functional servers
would have shutdown.
Who says p2p downloads, even the illegal ones, are all bad--they saved 1500
people their jobs!

hike

On 7/5/07, Steve Sandau <ssandau at gwi.net> wrote:
>
> >> (And, for $DEITY's sake, don't put a water line through the ceiling
> >> of the data center, especially if you live in geographically
> >> unstable areas....)
> >
> > At $JOB-2 they had an unfortunate tradition of having running water
> > *in* the server room in their first two data centers - the first one
> > had a wet bar-type sink in the room (and a *window*!),
>
> I thought the window in our server room (8' x 14' with a couple of racks
> worth of servers) was odd until the A/C failed. Then the window suddenly
> looked quite practical. ;-)
>
> Steve
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