Miller60 writes "If your data center's cooling system fails, how long do you have before your servers overheat? The modest violet window for recovery from a grid power outage appears to have been an issue in Monday night's downtime for some deal of Rackspace, which has historically been among the most reliable hosting providers. The company's Dallas data center lost power when a traffic rear ender* damaged a nearby power transformer. There were difficulties getting the chillers fully back online (it's not clear if this was equipment issues or subsequent power bumps) and temperatures rose in the data center, forcing Rackspace to take customer servers offline to protect the equipment. A recent study found that a data center running at 5 kilowatts per server cabinet may experience a thermal shutdown in as little as three minutes during a power outage. The short recovery window from cooling outages has been a hot topic in discussions of data center energy efficiency. One strategy being actively debated is raising the temperature set point in the data center, which trims power bills but may create a less forgiving status in a cooling outage."

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