Found out today, that one of our servers powered down, partly, last month when it was very hot!

It is one that I don't look after, generally, but I happened to look at the backup logs today (which another team is responsible for) and found that the server hadn't been backed up for a month! When I went in the computer room, the fans in the unit were screeching - it had seized up whilst powering down and had been running the fans at full tilt.

The thermometer I put in the room in July shows that the rack space got up to 45°C on that day! The server is set to shut down when the processors reach 85°C or the system 65°C.

On restart, the fans started buzzed loudly and the BIOS said that it was too hot to reboot, that it would wait 5 minutes before trying again! So I powered it down and waited for the technician who is responsible for the server to arrive (third party support still). It was a bit quieter then, having cooled off for a couple of hours. But we ran a virus check and the temperature of the second processor climbed from 65°C to 77°C within a minute and the fans were deafening!

We powered it off and pulled the server out of the rack. On opening it, there was a 2mm thick film of black dust - it looked like black material had been laid against the processor heatsinks! I took a can of compressed air to the internals and blew thick clouds of dust out of the machine. We put it back in the rack and it ran the virus scan at about 53°C, much better!

Given the heat in the room, I am surprised only the one server went down, and that it doesn't seem to have suffered any permanent damage! HP servers certainly seem to be well built. I wouldn't hesitate buying ProLiants again.

Sounds like you are having fun

Out of choice I always buy Proliants but due to cost it quite often ends up with Dells.

Our RIM Blackberry services server is a Dell 1U unit... Looks like it might be re-purposed as they are slowly switching to iPhones.

I used to work for a company that exclusively configured, tested and supplied HP server hardware (including SAN and backup solutions). Tbh they were the mutts nuts. Cost a bleeding fortune though!

I only install HP kit, might be a bit more expensive but it's pretty bombproof.
The only problem is that they don't like sending out engineers anymore.

All but one of our servers is made by HP. The one is by Dell which was the preferred server of one of our software vendors. They support that one.