If you are running your own server room, read this as it could prevent you from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Upon customer request, Six Feet Up has been operating its own Disaster Recovery Center for two years, providing our clients with highly available hosting that they need to power their mission-critical services.
The Six Feet Up Disaster Recovery Center has several racks and multiple fiber connections. The room has a dedicated heating and cooling system as servers are very sensitive to temperatures and can easily overheat and die in strange ways.
This summer has been one of the hottest ones in Indiana to the point when even our office space got a bit warm on a few scorching days.
This past Friday, at the time when most hardware issues happen or 5 pm, our environmental and video monitoring device, a NetBotz, sent us an email to alert us about a rise in the Disaster Recovery Center controlled environment's temperatures. We immediately contacted our heating and cooling vendor, Dial One, who was then able to fix the issue within an hour.
The ability to quickly address a temperature issue in our server room is critical as it guarantees against "inexplicable" malfunctions down the road, and, more importantly, protects our expensive hardware investments. Be sure to carefully monitor your server room's temperatures!