Intel tells data centre clients to turn up the heat
Comments
20 comments so far
Processors yes, maybe. Mechanical disks, no way.
Just asking for trouble.
Wal – December 14, 2011, 11:27AM
It’s not just the chips we have to worry about.
Main concern is disks.
AFurburger – December 14, 2011, 11:29AM
Back in the day, AMD Athlon processor’s would operate around the 70 degree mark but chips don’t have moving parts and not many companies are investing in SSD’s.
Conventional Hard Disks aren’t nearly as resilient. Storage technology needs to operate at lower temperatures.
What’s Intel playing at?
Sunny | Sydney – December 14, 2011, 11:55AM
Servers might be ok with working at 37C but the people working on them… not so much.
Steve – December 14, 2011, 12:01PM
@ People worried about mechanical drives:
Google did some research about failure rates into HDDs, and found that having the temp between 30-40 degrees will not chance the failure rates of your mechanical drives. Above 40 degrees with have an effect, but only after 3 years, so if you have a 3 year rotation policy for your drives (which in datacentres will almost be standard) then it has no impact anyway.
I’m pretty sure I can’t link to anything here, but have a search for ‘Google HDD temp datacentre’
chris – December 14, 2011, 12:39PM
This is an interesting move. However, the challagene is apart from Intel there many other vendors and variety of equipment that reside in the Data Centre. So, the industry as a whole has to confirm and agree upon to completely realise the benefits of these advances.
Saradhi Motamarri | Ryde – December 14, 2011, 12:45PM
Don’t believe me? Then consider this: How long did it take USB sticks to go from expensive 16Mb nerds-only tech to 32Gb household items sold at supermarkets? About 10 years. SSDs are based on the same techonolgy, and already a considerable way down the road to commonplace adoption…
Uthacalthing – December 14, 2011, 1:10PM
Came to say what chris said.
Google did testing on such an epic scale and one of their findings is they were more stable at higher temps.
pinkyfjord | Melbourne – December 14, 2011, 1:17PM
what was the humidity level in the Google study, air conditioning (and hence cost) isnt just about temperature…?
curious | Melbourne – December 14, 2011, 1:59PM
I’m curious to know how what conditions these "tests" were performed under. (In reference to how some here have said they can operate fine under a higher temperature.)
Some hard disks are worked hard all day whilst others not so much so. Was it idle? Was it sporadic? Were they a small amount of large file clumps, or a large amount of small file clumps? What kind of stress testing was done? Was the page file accessed heavily, or none at all during the processing? Etc etc etc…
I’m not disputing that it’s possible – and being in the industry myself, I’m well aware of the speed of change. But realise that different conditions will yield different results and it’s quite rare for a "one size fits all" conclusion.
"Myth Busts" usually have a fine print.
Sunny | Sydney – December 14, 2011, 2:10PM
Intel tells data centre clients to turn up the heat
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