Another spam email fraud

[Nick]

It used to be said of  tv studios that for each watt of lighting you needed a watt aircon.  And it all had be virtually silent.

It used to be that data centres were run at 18C or even less...

Nowadays they are run at around 25C. The servers are happy as long as there is no fluctuation - what they don't like is thermal shock.

This is where it gets interesting (or maybe not)... The average monthly temperature in the UK hasn't exceeded 19C in any month since 2015. Further, the daily temperature rarely exceeds 30C, so the outside air in most of the UK is nearly always cooler than a data center... So why do expensive and largely unnecessary cooling when you can just mix in heavily filtered external air and do it that way just for the cost of running fans and a fancy ducted mixing system. Another huge advantage other than the reduction in capital and running costs of the HVAC is that backup supplies (UPS, generator) can similarly be downsized. On those few days the external temperature does exceed 25C, you only need to cool the external air by the few degrees needed to bring it back to around 25C for mixing... Modern data centres also use "hot aisles' where all the hot air from the equipment is not simply vented into the server room, it's ducted directly to the outside (maybe via heat recovery to heat office space etc).

This is free-air cooling.

Regarding the comments in the article referenced above about underutilised processors... There are several significant errors in the article - CPUs rarely run at anything like full power - modern servers are very good at adjusting speed and thus power usage depending on demand, just like the power grid does. Underutilised processors have long been an expensive issue, but the advent of containerisation with Docker and friends means that load sharing of microservices is easy and far fewer resources are wasted.

Btw. Docker runs very happily on Raspberry Pis - I use it extensively, even at home.