If our datacentres cannot take the heat, the UK could really go off the rails

theguardian.com:

One of the unexpected delights of the heatwave was the sound of a Conservative transport secretary talking sense. Grant Shapps was on the Today programme on Tuesday morning explaining a basic principle of good engineering design: get the specifications right. When you’re creating a new piece of public infrastructure you need to be able to specify the constraints under which the design is expected to function.

Shapps explained that the railway system over which he currently presides was designed to operate between temperatures of -10C and 35C. And, in an astute move to preempt a furious Daily Mail editorial about staunch British rail tracks surely being able to cope with temperatures a mere five degrees above their design limit, he pointed out that if the air temperature is 40C, the actual temperature of the rails might be twice that. They are, after all, made of steel and could conceivably buckle in the heat, which is why some lines had been closed that day.

Interestingly, the railway industry was not the only one that couldn’t take the heat. When the temperature reached 40.3C on Tuesday, datacentres operated by Google and Oracle had to be taken offline. According to The Register “Selected [Google] machines were powered off to avoid long-term damage, causing some resources, services, and virtual machines to become unavailable, taking down unlucky websites and the like.” And at 3:41pm Oracle customers received an alert telling them that: “As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre experienced an issue. This led to a subset of our service infrastructure needing to be powered down to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures. This step has