Comment by otterley

My company's cage was the unfortunate neighbor of Google's cage at Exodus SC3 in Santa Clara. Even then, Google's compute density was much higher than industry standards. They didn't rack-mount their servers; they basically extracted every part that wound be in a case (motherboard, PSU, disks, heat sinks, etc.) and laid it on a cork board shelf. They then placed the boards two units deep, so if you needed to service the unit in back, you'd have to remove the unit in front first. These were all wired like spaghetti to an HP switch sitting on top of the cabinet. It looked like a meth head's house. Here's a photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#/media/Fil...

Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.

This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.