My last client had their main nationwide server, that their company depended upon, in a stuffy closet under a fire sprinkler. No it never went off, but dang.
Anyway folks in Enterprise can forget, any organization under a certain size doesn't have any special consideration for their computer systems. They just grew from some PC on a desk to whatever server/router/firewall situation they are in now.
My favourite of that was when we grew from "some PCs plugged into extension leads from a floorbox" to four full racks of 2U servers, without ever upgrading the power distribution. Until someone noticed that one of the consumer-grade extension leads powering the whole setup had gone brown ...
Oh, and if there was a power cut you'd have to disconnect the racks and bring them back one at a time or the inrush current would trip the building breaker again.
I recall hearing years ago of someone modifying, I believe, the BIOS on a fileserver to spin up the hard drives one at a time so that the inrush current didn't cause brownouts (on the PSU or on the building circuit I don't recall)
> The biggest change was allowing only one drive per tray to be powered on at a time. In fact, to ensure that a software bug doesn’t power all drives on by mistake and blow fuses in a data center, we updated the firmware in the drive controller to enforce this constraint. The machines could power up with no drives receiving any power whatsoever, leaving our software to then control their duty cycle.
I've seen too many little server rooms where the AC unit is installed above the false ceiling directly above the server rack.
It makes sense, in a way... except that the condensation collection lines are also right above the server rack, and sooner or later someone forgets to do maintenance and you spring a leak.
Put it over the walkway, for pity's sake (also, then you can work on it with a fully populated server room!)
My highscools server rack was in the basement with an AC unit, which pumped it's exhaust heat right into another adjoining room that functioned as an equiment room for my extracurricular. We had to get in and out as fast as we could because that room was like 100 degrees
Anyway folks in Enterprise can forget, any organization under a certain size doesn't have any special consideration for their computer systems. They just grew from some PC on a desk to whatever server/router/firewall situation they are in now.