[randomdestructn]

> with fewer components they can function at temperatures as high as 85F. (Most servers are expected to keel over at 75F.)

I'm no datacentre guy, so can someone clarify if this is a typo? What kind of electronics start failing just above room temperature?

I'd think HDDs would be the most sensitive, but google said failures aren't well correlated to hdd temp (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf‎)

[ghshephard]

This was a popular attitudes in the 80s, and 90s, until Google, Intel and others did some research and discovered that Cold data centers aren't the be-all/end-all.

After reading the research I kept on the order of 100 servers in a server room at approx. 80 degrees for a couple years, and didn't see any devices fail.

I don't think anyone in the last 10+ years has believe that "servers are expected to keel over at 75F"

[6cxs2hd6]

I think they meant C not F.

[leeoniya]

85F ambient maybe?, the components are necessarily much hotter then.

meanwhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtDuqqR_Dbg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IX9U2zaI_I

[coherentpony]

Are you sure they don't actually mean celsius, rather than fahrenheit?

[bronson]

Yep. 85degC is super hot, and junction temp is usually a few tens of degrees hotter than the ambient temp. Even if the packaging and interconnects can handle it, the dies themselves will fail early due to metal migration.

Of course, if the average working life of a Google server is measured in months, then maybe that's no big deal.