Classic WTF: Server Room Fans and More Fun

In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to reposition a power cable slightly for the rack I was working in. What I saw stayed with me.

Stuffed under the floor of the adjacent rack were perhaps a dozen-or-so small servers, switches, the odd modem or 2, and perhaps a kvm box. The tenant had obviously exceeded his physical space but not his power allocation. He had simply "gone underground". Like a little farm of blinking LED mushrooms in the dark.

When I was a operator at a computer room (early 80s) with 3 Wang VS Systems and a couple of 2200 systems and multiple large line printers. The company had the cheapest AC Systems installed and no raised floors, all wires would drop down from the ceiling instead.

So in the summer time, the room would sometimes be well above 90F (32C). When that happened we had to have multiple large fans brought in. To add to that, the room was on the top floor (3rd) and during heavy rain storms, the roof would leak. So out came clear plastic tarps to cover the units.

I wish I had taken pictures. But I will say something, we never had no hardware failures due to heat and water dripping. After a few years the company finally built a real computer room.

One building I worked at had their DMARC room/closet only accessible from the handicapped stall in the men’s restroom. Yup.

I mounted a colo server backwards once. The fan intakes were on the warm side and the output on the cool side. I was so embarrassed. It was like that for years and anyone that looked in our cage would see it. I was mortified.

Goodness. I wish I had a cameraphone in the 90s. There were tons of data centers, IT rooms, telco, labs, meetme rooms, sewers, all done at the seat of your pants.

Working in Malaysia in 2001, had to fireup some backup fans some weekends, as the building owner would switch off our floor aircon. Fortunately lived in the neighbouring residential tower so it wasn't far to walk to check on it. Eventually got a dedicated circuit for the server room.

Man I forgot this website even existed. I'm so pleased to see it's still up and running. It was a regular fixture on my RSS feed back in my university days (20 years ago, yeesh). I might have to take some time this morning going through the past couple of decades of posts.