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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

For one company? That’s pretty impressive.

When I was on an architecture team that consolidated ~80 datacenter to 3 circa 2010, this was a key dollar driver. We raised the temperature ~6 degrees from the average temp, which meant kicking out a few vendors initially. The cost savings for doing that was essentially the total operational costs of 5 datacenters.

The annual failure rates for the hardware did not change at all by any metric. Number of service impacting hardware failures went to zero due to the consolidation.

In general, if you operate within the operating ranges of your hardware, you won’t have failure. You will have complaints from employees, because computers will operate at temperatures not comfortable for humans.

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We did the same several years ago. At the time I found http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/temperature_cam.pdf quite interesting. I didn't find many other precise papers about issues when running at a higher temperatures, but many "should" and "can".

Based on ASHARE there are two guidelines from HPE and IBM: https://www.chiltrix.com/documents/HP-ASHRAE.pdf https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/1Q94RPGE

We found (by measurement) that some places in the datacenter with suboptimal airflow are well over the average or simulated temperature so one can leave the safe temperature envelope if one isn't careful.

The beauty of a big project like is you get the engineering resources to lake sure the datacenter is working right.

The hyper scale people take this to the next degree.

It's almost certainly Google, since they've historically ran their data centers hotter than most [0]. Cooling efficiency increases with a higher delta-T to the working fluid, and Google uses a gigawatt or two continuously [1]. From PUE numbers that's hundreds of MW spent on cooling, so making it more efficient is quite worth it.

[0] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/ [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/13/google-data-center-goal-100p...

> The annual failure rates for the hardware did not change at all by any metric.

I don't know what kind of magical hardware you ran, but from the datacenters I've interacted with this is absolute nonsense. Higher temps and/or humidity have an immediate effect on failure rates, to the point where we could plan extra time for them next week if the temp raised even .5 degrees.

Don't you want to have AC running on cooling mode or dehydration mode to get water out of the air?

edit: this makes me wonder what is the ideal humidity in a data centre? Is too dry a thing?

Dry air makes static electricity buildup more.

Too dry is worse than too humid (to a point).

I’m not in this game anymore, but I remember Yahoo built a datacenter in NY off Lake Erie that wasn’t cooled. They aligned the building lengthwise on a ridge above the lake and just blew air through it with no AC. No idea how it operated though.

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