[Nottingham] Office server rooms

[Martin]

Andy,

On 26/07/18 01:27, Andy Smith via Nottingham wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> You would only be able to argue for some sort of compensation if
> your lease has an SLA for aircon failures. Virtually no office space
> leases do, even for tech offices, even if they include a
> pre-partitioned "machine room" space. ...

Thanks for good comment.

That's where having your own independent monitoring running is always a
good idea so as to note when something 'unusual' might be going on...

I caught the MD 'secretly' giving 'tours' around the (locked,
off-limits, out-of-bounds, secured,) server rooms that was indicated by
the temperature blips on some of the disks whilst the server room door
was left open. The aircon would try to catch up to then
over-compensate... (Checked with Facilities and as usual they didn't
want to know or do anything, so had to do my own sleuthing for that one.)


Aside: For the ultimate server room with a view:

*Linux in SPAAACE* !

... supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days...
No rad hardening...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/hpe_iss_supercomputer/

#####
HPE’s mini supercomputer launched into space last year has survived the
harsh conditions of zero gravity and radiation for almost a year.

The Spaceborne Computer isn’t the greatest supercomputer and has a
performance of one teraflop, runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is
built out of two HPE Apollo Intel x86 servers with a 56Gbps interconnect.

NASA wanted to see if a (COTS) computer would last for a year...
#####


Even up there in a *very* controlled environment, they've had their
hiccups with:

#####
There have only been two instances where the supercomputer went down,
and both were random accidents.

One happened when the smoke alarm aboard the ISS was falsely triggered
which in turn switched off the power supply for emergency purposes. “All
sorts of things float around in the space station, ... and maybe [some]
particles got lodged in the smoke detector. We don’t know what caused
it,” he said.

The other one was down to an astronaut who accidentally turned off the
power switch to a rack that contained HPE’s computer...
#####


Stay cool folks!

Cheers,
Martin


COTS: "Commercial Off The Shelf", 'commodity low cost systems'.