Protection
How warm is too warm for our server room?
Equipment is designed for roughly 18 to 27 degrees Celsius, 64 to 81 Fahrenheit, measured at the front where it draws air in. The number that matters is not the one on a Tuesday afternoon; it is the one at 2am on a Sunday.
Answered by Nate Weigel, Protection Director
The range, and why the top of it is fine
Vendors design for about 18 to 27 degrees Celsius at the intake. Running near the top of that band is normal and costs less to cool than chasing a chilly room. What does damage is sustained heat above it, and as a rule of thumb every ten degrees Celsius over design roughly halves the life of the electronics. A room running twenty degrees warm turns a seven-year server into a four-year one without ever failing outright.
Measure at the front, not at the door
Room temperature at head height by the door tells you very little. The number that matters is the air going into the front of the equipment, which in a badly arranged rack can be much hotter because it is somebody else's exhaust.
The weekend is the problem
Building air conditioning steps back at night and at weekends, which is exactly when the room is shut, empty and unobserved. We have logged rooms sitting comfortably on a Tuesday afternoon and touching 40 degrees by Sunday night. By Monday it is cool again and nobody knows. This is why we log over time instead of taking a reading.
What to do about it
Cooling the room controls itself rather than following the building thermostat. For a closet that is usually a single small mini-split, costing less than the server it protects. Then an environment monitor that texts a list of people when it drifts, whatever the hour, so the first warning is not a dead firewall.
Where we did this
A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. Ask for the date of the last tested restore.
What to actually test TechnologyMulti-factor on email but not on the remote gateway is a locked front door with the back door open. Do all of them.
Multi-factor everywherePeople also ask
Where should our server actually live?
In a space with airflow, stable power, no water above it and a door that locks. Heat is the most common environmental killer of business equipment, and the room that is fine in March is a different room in July.
The full answerWhat is a server room reorganization, and is it worth paying for?
It is making the room possible to reason about: inventory, cable management, labelling at both ends, documentation, power and airflow. It turns a two-hour outage into a twenty-minute one, and it is far cheaper scheduled than done in an emergency.
The full answerEvery IT company says they are proactive. What does it actually mean?
Work that gets done while nothing is wrong, funded on an argument rather than an emergency. In 2019 we replaced open remote access with VPNs across our client base because we did not like the exposure. A year later every client had to send staff home.
The full answer
"As always, efficient, non-intrusive and complete!"
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