From an article:

About 11 buildings have lost air conditioning because of the failure,
Stone said. The problem threatens to overheat computer servers, and
officials are warning that the state’s main web page will be out of
service periodically throughout the day.

It is hard to realize how important cooling is in a data center or even a small switch room until the AC cooling said room goes out. It can heat up pretty fast if you’re not decisive and that can really cripple business.

How do you plan for such an event?

– Make sure you have redundant cooling solutions; while you might not need multiple heavy industry coolers, at least have something available to either vet warm air or introduce cool air. While normal fans are absolutely no replacement to AC cooling, moving air is better than stagnating warm air.

– Keep AC repair service numbers or contracts readily available for quick remediation.

– In your inventory of servers and systems and services, make sure you know which ones are critical and which ones are expendable over short periods of time. Just like trying to milk juice out of your UPS in a power outage, you want to milk the temperature in your server room as long as possible. Shut down all unnecessary servers and devices to minimize heat generation. Be ready to determine when critical temps are reached that will almost certainly damage equipment and/or data and be prepared to invoke a business continuity plan or…be ready to have the company take the day off…