Drama in NYC as data center temp passes 100 degrees

"If building infrastructure is not restored, Zayo's intention would be to tie its 7th floor services and cooling infrastructure directly to this back-up power source and maintain this through full commercial utility restoration," the company said.

Delivery of the generator is expected to take 2.5 to 3.5 hours depending on traffic.

"We have not had any customer outages due to this," said Matthew Brouker," a Zayo spokesman, "All systems are running."

The company is providing ongoing conference calls with its customers with its CTO, Marty Snella, who was answering questions, and assuring them that it had hours of battery backup if the generator fails or is taken off-line.

Vince Renaud, vice president of of Uptime Institute Professional Services, in response to a query about high temperatures in a data center, said, an email response, that that American Society of Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends that temperatures in data cneters not exceed 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

"There is much debate about going into the allowable range of anything above 80 (degrees) as voiding warranties by equipment manufacturers," said Renaud.

He said that "93 degrees will produce catastrophic results for computer equipment or, if no immediate affects - then will result in 'wounded servers' that will fail later on when you least expect it."

Telx, which also operates a data center at 111 8th Ave., said, in a posted note, that as of 1 p.m. ET, there haven't been unusual temperature increases in its data center. Telx is asking customers of its two data centers in NYC, the other is at 60 Hudson St., to assist in reducing electrical load and curtail their systems where possible and to "power down any nonessential equipment at this time."

In an email to Computerworld, a Telx official said its data center isn't having problems similar to that of Zayo, suggesting that the latter's issue could be specific to it or to its infrastructure.

Telx is not expecting Con Edison to restore power to the building for three or four days.

Another data center company operating at 111 8th Ave., Equinix, reported Wednesday that it had a problem a failed generator "that impacted service to several customers."

Equinix said "repairs were made and service was restored within one hour and 15 minutes."

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov, or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

Read more about Data Center in Computerworld's Data Center Topic Center.