I finally saw a server rack at a small town bank in Ohio that made me think

Walked into a local bank in Mansfield to do some wiring and noticed their whole server setup was just stacked on a metal shelf with NO cooling. Is it better to have a messy but COOL setup or a clean one that turns into an oven after a few hours?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan.cameron7d ago

My buddy Mike works at a credit union in Akron and he told me they had a similar setup in their break room closet. They stacked three old Dell servers on a wire shelf with a box fan pointed at them 24/7. The fan blew dust all over their coffee mugs and papers. One afternoon the fan cord got kicked out and the servers overheated within like 45 minutes, shut down the whole branch during lunch rush. They ended up having to work from paper checks for two days while the IT guy drove up from Columbus.

betty_shah7d agoMost Upvoted

Gotta push back a LITTLE on the timeline there, 45 minutes is WAY too fast for servers to overheat from just a fan dying unless they were already running hot. Most enterprise gear can handle a few hours without active cooling, especially Dells. I bet it was more like a slow cook over days or weeks with the fan being the only thing keeping them barely alive, and when it stopped, the temp spiked but the damage was already done from previous heat cycles. That's why the whole branch went down, it was a cumulative failure not a sudden one. Your buddy Mike probably just remembers it as "right after the fan died" but the real culprit was months of dust and heat buildup.