The Seattle area experienced a bit of a heat wave yesterday. We realize that the rest of the country has seen temperatures even higher, but it is rare for our cool marine & mountain location to see things get as hot as they did in the past few days. The peak came yesterday afternoon, around 5 pm, when we hit 98°F/37°C outside. I'm happy to say that our datacenter's peak temperature was 74°F/23°C.

Today we have high overcast, and expected highs in the low-80s. Datacenter temps should remain in the mid-high 60s.

We've been making continual improvements to our HVAC system. Adding and making modifications to existing duct work mostly. We've boosted our cooling capacity by about 20% in the past few weeks. As we've filled our facility we have been adapting the generic air diffusers with custom duct work. The aim of which is to direct cool air into specific areas, namely the front of the racks. Servers are generally designed to cool front to back. Visitors to our facility will note that we arrange rows of servers with the backs of servers facing into alternate rows. This creates "hot aisles" and "cold aisles", a standard industry practice in datacenters. Cold air from the HVAC system falls down from just above, is pulled into the servers, and hot exhaust air rises up to the top of the room where it is pulled out by the HVAC system's hot air return system. What we have been doing the past several months in preparation for summer is focussing the cold air. This involves custom duct work.

Above: A shipment of our custom ducting arrives.

Above: Custom ducting awaits installation in the datacenter.

Above: A custom duct installed in a client's cage. Note the room for their planned expansion. Note also the unmodified generic air diffuser to the left. It is from these that we mount the custom ducts.

For our general rackspace datacenter we have taken the generic diffusers and focused the new ducts down and into the cold aisles. In the cage space datacenter, we have extended custom ducts directly to the front of customer's servers. This work allows us to better control airflow and maintain the optimum air temps right where it matters. Later this year we'll be adding similar duct work, this time above the hot aisles, specifically to remove hot air and bring it back to the return of the HVAC systems.

Above: The business end of our auxiliary HVAC system.

We have also added a large custom diffuser with dampers in 14" conduit heads on our auxiliary HVAC system. Throughout most of the year, this unit does not even run. In warmer conditions we can open a subset of the dampers and provide supplementary cooling in a very general fashion to the entire facility. On very hot days like yesterday we open them all and provide the extra HVAC tonnage to keep the facility cool. In emergency situations such as last week we can attach temporary lightweight ducts to the 14" heads and run them through the ladder rack to the specific areas of the datacenter that need it.

Stay tuned for some more exciting news very soon about expanded capabilities and additional layers of redundancy!

Chuck Goolsbee
VP, Technical Operations
digital.forest