Patent ID: 8805590

Claim:
A method comprising: individually measuring a current airflow through each computing device of a plurality of computing devices installed within a rack having a maximum airflow associated within a cooling component for the rack, the computing devices having fan speeds governing airflows through the computing devices; transmitting, by the computing devices the current airflows therethrough; calculating a sum of the current airflows through the computing devices from the current airflows measured through the computing devices individually; and choosing one or more selected computing devices of the plurality of computing devices responsive to calculating that the sum of the current airflows is greater than the maximum airflows associated with the cooling component for the rack, as the computing devices that have current fan speeds less than maximum fan speeds at which the fans of the computing devices are operable; and decreasing the fan speeds of the selected computing devices so that the fans of the computing devices do not together exhaust more air into the rack than the cooling component can exhaust out of the rack, wherein each computing device, as a given computing device, has a fan to exhaust heat generated within the given computing device into the rack in which the given computing device is installed, wherein the cooling component for the rack is to exhaust the heat exhausted by the fans of the computing devices into the rack from the rack to outside the rack, the maximum airflow associated with the cooling component being a maximum flow of air that the cooling component is able to remove from the rack, wherein the maximum airflow associated with the cooling component for the rack is less than a sum of a maximum device airflow associated with each computing device individually, and wherein the selected computing devices do not immediately throttle one or more of processor instruction execution frequency, hard disk drive platter rotation rate, or memory access frequency, but are now configured to throttle the one or more of processor instruction execution frequency, hard disk drive platter rotation rate, or memory access frequency at a future point of time.