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> Initially, the datacenter was able to maintain its operational temperatures through a load dependent thermal buffer that was designed within the cooling system. However, once this thermal buffer was depleted the datacenter temperature exceeded safe operational thresholds, and an automated shutdown of devices was initiated

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Total failure of a data center's cooling apparatus seems to be a very rare occurrence to me, perhaps limited to simultaneous failure of utility and genset power (example: electrical switchgear and fuel pumps underwater due to flooding).

Anyone have any data around how frequently such a failure occurs?

I had the same thought. The only thing I could come up with is that it wasn't a failure of power supply, but that a surge took down enough cooling systems that they couldn't maintain temperature. A lot of DC's I've seen are N+1 with cooling (or even 2N), but they all run at the same time and are the same units. Or the control system went down, and they weren't able to get it back up and running, although I would think they would have redundancy in that case.

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