Well… nowadays, servers don’t produce as much heat as their older
pendants which had to be cooled using water. Yet the Microsoft data
center in Ireland hat to stutter when the air flow has shut down for an
unknown reason with a firware update recently successful applied.

So when such things happen, I have one question for myself: Why is the temperature reseerve so low? We all know that air has less heat capacity than water. And highly-integrated datacenters require a good cooling though! So running a datacenter at the absolute maximum is a bit risky especially when the cooling is about to fail.

Now one might say: “Hey, it was only 16 hours where Outlook.com, hotmail.com and live.com were not available!” – But believe it or not: there are customers relying on these services and it’s exactly these customers, which can be scared away with blackouts like these.

So whenever an update of a SPS or whatever device is going to temper with critical systems (and cooling IS one of the critical systems!) then a Plan B should be crucial to keep downtimes as short as possible…

And if you have some schadenfreude for Microsoft now: No, it has also happened to other biggies of the IT already: Apple, Amazon, Google…!

So it’s not just Microsoft who got victim of such rigid money-saving plans…