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Home Server Rooms?
Tuzanor
writes "I've got a buddy moving into a brand new house. Being
geeks, we've decided to wire the house with a large home network.
While this story
took care of wiring the house, we need to figure out how to create a
well set up server room. We'll be having both towers and rack mounted
computers as well as various switches, UPSes, etc. Also, we figure
this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while
still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold
Canadian night (without opening a window)"
Has always been my solution of choice. Of course, that only takes care of half the problem. I had considered switching vents. (Hey, if it works for 10baseT...) These could reroute the air to wherever it needed to be.
Open the window?
if you DON'T cool it, you also solve the problem of your staying warm on those cold winter nights...
--
fight global cooling
You could try to invite some cool chicks.
Would it be possible to install a ceiling vent fan, similar to those found in bathrooms used to vent steam? If you could do that, and possibly keep a window open a crack (just enough to balance the outside cold with the inside heat so it's comfortable), then close the door to the room, you'll be all set.
-kidlinux.
i would go with some insane liquid cooling.
i have no experience with rackmount servers though, so i dont know if it can be done easily, or if its worth the cost.
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As far as heat is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much. Given the extreme lack of sexual activity associated with wiring your house with switches, UPSes, and god-knows what other geek toys, your house should stay plenty cold throughout the year, especially during the winter.
The pomposity of the professor is inversely proportional to the difficulty and importance of the subject being taught.
...has benefits both ends of the scale..
:)
in the winter, the hot air helps warm the rest of the house, in the summer it helps keep air circulating in the server room to help the fans do their job.
Also, try to make the server room downstairs or in a basement or something (take advantage of the rising heat - both through the ceiling of the room and the flowing air after its left the server room due to the ventilation).
A somewhat modified desk fan stuck in a hole in the wall might also be nice
Liquid nitrogen?
Well, I recently converted what used to be a 10'x6' pantry in my basement into a server room.
I tore out all of the old shelves, and picked up a bunch of nicer ones from Revy to hold my main servers and my (still nonfunctional) cluster, and screwed them into one of the longer walls. Opposite that, I used some of the old shelves to
make a small workbench, and I left room to add 2 or 3 racks (not that I'll ever need that much space) at a later date. It works really well, and because it used to be a pantry, and 2 of the walls are bare concrete, as is the floor, its stays down right COLD in there, even with 10 or so boxes going.
In the server room at my old place of work, we had some heating problems in the summer. If you make sure the room is well-ventilated (opening windows, having air ducts, etc.), regular old ceiling fans work wonders for cooling large rooms, and make your server room look more classy as well :-) Just be sure to keep them spinning at their fastest speed if you've got a lot of Alphas...
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Tell a few people that they can room for free in this new house if they stay in that room. And blow upon the servers. For all eternity.
---------
Sometimes there's no other way to win, except by falling.
Use vents to pull air from the coolest parts of the house (basement, unheated porches, etc) and pump that through the server room. Have another set of vents to pull the hot air from the server room into back into the house. This lets the server room act as a secondary heater to your primary one and cools the room.
-=Gonzotek=-
At my office, we've got a ceiling mounted AC unit. It hangs from the drop ceiling, and I imagine it's less expensive than a full home-cooling AC unit, so probably no more than 500 bucks, maybe much cheaper. But it keeps our server room at a crispy 50 degrees F with minimal chill seeping out (so insulate the door).
Is this a serious question?
Just set up the ventilation system to suck warm air from the top of the server room, and pipe it to the colder rooms in the house.
For air return, install intakes near the bottom of some of the colder rooms.
It would cost like $50 at a home improvement store to get enough flexible ducting and registers.
Go to a surplus site like www.mpja.com and get some AC powered fans with a good CFM output.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Is there any real reason why you can't just buy a couple of those big basement freezers and put them in there? It can't be too hard to put in extra lights if you need them, and I guess some silica dessicant would be a good thing to have in there too...
After all, it is only a home server room. ;-)
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
If the room is on an outside wall, simply closing the heat register in the room should keep it quite a bit cooler. This will also work for interior rooms, but not as much.
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
Something to consider: in California right now, electricity runs $0.10 to $0.25 per kw/hour. That means the cost per 100 watts of 24/7 computer equipment is between $7 and $23 per month. Easy ouch.
Next, don't be a cooling idiot. If it's cold outside and your server room is hot, use the server room to warm the rest of the house. Air circulation. Central placement of server room in basement.
This depends upon the house and your price range but why not use the "waste heat." If you can setup the hvac to vent from the outside into that room and then from there into the rest of the house you can help to keep the whole place warm. Depending upon the setup this may make an economical dent in the heating bills.
;)
If that doesn't work, make the room into a sauna
Why not just vent the heat from the server room to the rest of the hose, warming the house as well as cooling the server room. Of course, this is only a good solution for the winter. In the summer, I would just us the good old AC.
There are a few of ways to do it:
1) Shut off the incoming heating vents to the room in the Winter. Then reopen them in the summer when you don't heat your house, or when you have the AC on.
2) Make sure any outgoing vents are open so that air from the room is circulated out.
3) Fans in the window (in case the room really gets hot.)
4) Thermostat controlled fans or AC unit in the window.
Take care,
Brian
--
We are almost out of Free Palm Pilots...
--
Surely you've heard of this :). We use this at the office. Keeps the machine room (two big rooms) really nice and cool (around 69 deg F) and the rest of the office floor is heated via central heating and stays around 71 deg F.
Even better, put it in the bathroom, put your servers in the shower and just run water on them. Having them in that bathroom makes it easier to surf for pr0n while on the hopper.
I've submitted this as a story. Hope Taco et al think it's of interest.
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My server lives in a small closet in my Toronto appartment. I haven't bothered ventilating yet because it seems OK during the winter. But last summer, the hard drive died.. (I should probably fix that this summer. :)
I think the easiest solution for you is to make sure the room is well ventilated with the rest of the house. In the winter, this will contribute to the heat in the house (and the furnace won't turn on as much) and in the summer, the air coniditioner will eventually pump the heat outside (if you have one). Mind you, if you have AC, you might get away without ventilation.
Good luck, I hope everything goes smoothly!
Why not? Install a louvered thermostatically controlled exhaust fan and provide a louvered intake opening a few feet away. You want hinged louvers that close by gravity and are pushed open by the air from the fan.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Start with two racks, fill them with servers, Put the towers in the middle. Now, stuff those in to a small closet. You're running these all a bit OC'd, right? Great, now got to the store and pick up a product called "Cake Mix." Follow the directions on the box. It will likley need milk, water, and eggs. Put this solution in a pan and then you've got an oven that can play quake.
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Why not just spread everything around? That way heat won't build up in a single room.
shouldn't be too expensive...
You'll definately want your connection dropped to that room, that's my first suggestion, or you'll go nuts later and kick yourself forever. Depending on the number of 1/2U systems you'll be using, a short stack can be easily hidden in a custom made (well-ventilated) box in the corner, complete with slide out racks(think drawers). I assume you'd also have at least one more workstation in this room, prolly more than that by the sounds of it, for lan gaming when friends come over and such (as you probably don't want to leave them alone in your daughters room while you frag them from your cushy den:). What I would do is find a nice counter-top that you like and build a wrap-around counter on two of the walls, meeting at a corner; this leaves plenty of center room space for big-leather-rolly-chairs-wars. You can easily hide all the towers, UPSs and cables under the counter, leaving tons of leg room, with everything else up top(obviously). I cool mine(let's just say I hear what you're asking) with an hotel wall-mount AC, which I picked up cheap from a place that was about to be torn down, YMMV.
Plug everything in and invite the neighbors, cheers.
put the what in the where?
Personally, I've got my boxen sitting within inches of the furnace and I've had them there for months without a problem. I live in Seattle, about 125 miles from the Canadian border so the climate is somewhat similar. Unless your buddy is looking at putting in loads of servers and other equipment I can't imagine that you'd have a problem. If you really want to 'do it right' you can usually get most manufacturers to give you the heat output rates for their equipment in BTUs per hour. Add all the rates together then you'll have an idea of how bad things are likely to get. I would imagine you'd have more problems with too much heat then not enough; it might not be a bad idea to check the room where the rack is going to go and verify that it has adequate ventilation to carry the heat load. Stick a wall-mounted thermometer in and see how it goes over time.
One thing that you should really think about with rack equipment is the noise level. Manufacturers of rack-mounted equipment just love to shove lots and lots of fans in the backsides of their boxes; this tends to make a great deal of unwanted noise. Unless the plan is to have all this stuff in a separate room where no one is going to be in you might want to consider spending the extra money and get a glass or plastic enclosed rack. It costs more but hey, it definitely has the cool factor covered.
Maybe you could build in a basement, and then build the roof of that room out of metal. The heat would be used to heat the rest of the house; and it would keep the room (relativley) cool. Barring that, a BIG fan might help also.
Everything is mainstream now.
My house is about 7000 Square Feet, I have about 10 network drops in the whole house. one in my moms office, family room, dining room, kitchen, brothers room, a few in my computer room for my main system and my SGI Indigo2. anyways all the wires run downstairs into my basement to my 28 Port switch (50 bucks off ebay). I have no protection for it. it is just sitting in a damp basement and it seems to run fine.. it has been for months. it is a rackmount switch so I have it mounted on the studs in the wall.
Why didn't you just ask a local heating/cooling company? There several ways to handle it... depending on the size of the house, you can have multiple systems, or have dampers in the the ventilation system that can control the air flow to each rooms (with multiple thermostats).
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
I lived in Michigan, and Canada is (almost all) north of Michigan so I'd say that you really don't need to worry in the winter. One day I almost considered writing a program to check a thermal censor and turn up the processor on the computer/turn on the other computer/moniter/etc to increase the heat in the room. If you give it a window the heat will probably escape well enough without being opened plus as has been said 200 times already it'll help heat your home.
The summer is the challange. Since you have a window, a window AC unit may be a good match. You can pick one up for probably something like $250/US at a Zellor's or Walmart or wherever. If it's a speced for a room a bit bigger than the one the computers are in, then it'll take care of the room no problem, especially if you've got central air.
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Since this is a new house, why don't you just get a REALLY BIG fridge.
Ironically, several overclockers I know have taken this approach... I forget how they solved the humidity problem, though...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I hope you weren't asking for any serious answers to this question. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
:)
Come on people, let's have fun with this one and just come up with the most retarded answers we can come up with.
Concrete is interesting; its supposed to insulate, but for some reason it breathes cold air. The house I just bought was built during the Cold War and has an interesting room in the basement: the walls and ceiling are thick concrete. The temperature stays rather cool with all the electronic equipment running and I had to put in a quartz heater just to stay comfortable.
What's the power consumption of your computers? What's the heat generation? How often will they be running? Where, geographically, are you building this? What's the mean annual cooling and heating degree days for that location? How well insulated will the room be? How much money do you have to spend?
There's a lot of variables here. Give us more information. But, if you're going to be running more than about 5 computers, then you'll need A/C. Less than that, just leave the door open.
You want a cramped, untidy little room, with a stack of buzzing boxen to the left (from the bottom: OpenBSD, Linux, Cisco IOS, topped off with an old 15" monitor). No KVM - that's cheating; you have to scrabble around amongst the spaghetti cabling to switch the monitor to another box. Keep spare kbd's, mice etc draped over the monitor or propped against the wall when not in use; with the lights off, those three extra LEDs on the keyboard add to the girlfriend-impressing "Starship Enterprise" look'n'feel. To the right, balanced on top of the tower system housing your main workstation, you want an old analogue modem, and a desktop switch of some sort. Make sure the CAT5 from the rest of the house terminates just behind this switch - that way you get to mix the network cables up with the PSU, parallel cable->backup device, serial extenstions, phone plug-thrus etc. Top with stacks of unread magazines - New Scientist, Perl Journal etc - a couple of rows of books (remember to break the O'Reilly hegemondy with a carefully placed K&R, the Conway book, perhaps something on OO, SQL, firewalls, IDS and network security. Season with a sprinkling of "carefully filed" hardcopies of whitepapers, Slashdot stories, tech specs, man pages, discussions on the use of IGMP in scanning.
Remember to get the carpet professionally steam-cleaned once or twice a year. Remember to empty the waste basket and remove uneaten food and drink containers.
Cover the walls in Dilbert cartoons, printouts of UserFriendly, inadvertently amusing advertising materials, color "maps of the internet", and the SANS "Network Security Roadmap" poster (change every six months!)
My personal shelter from the world, which looks just like this of course, copes with (a) having no radiators (or windows) by being right in the core of the building, so avoiding getting too hot in summer; and (b) avoiding getting too cold in winter (it's below zero outside, here in the UK at present) by housing the central heating boiler.
At one point I seriously contemplated moving a campbed in here to save rent (I'm unemployed, & live in a shared house.) But my girlfriend said she'd cut my balls off, and then leave me. So that was that
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
put it in the basement and route a duct to cool it. shouldent be too hard.. but you guy's worry about cooling too much. my computer has been on for months straight, the damn heat sinc is glowing (not really) but it is very hot and this system is running fine. but I just want this duron 700 to die so I have an excuse to get a Athalon XP but no matter what I do, even running it without the fan on wont kill the beast.
I built a small room in my parents attic which is in Texas (as in "Texas - it isn't hell but you can see the gates from here)
The room gets quit warm so I insulated it, and ran an air conditioning duct to it along with a return duct. It stays quite cool durring the summer and durring the winter, provides heat back to the main house when the A/c fan is on. If I had much in there, I would consider getting a small window A/c unit to ensure it stayed cool. just keep in mind where the condensation is going to go.
The real issue isn't cooling during the cold canadian winters, it's cooling during the blistering canadian summers( man it gets hot here).
You're best bet is to have some ceiling mounted A/c units for summer, and just open a window in the winter. if you have 2 windows in the room, then you're set.
build a simple wooden shack adjecent to the house, with no insulation of any kind. put everything there. run wires from that shack to inside the house (maybe through a window that's been packed with some insulation).
ideally, you'd want everything outside for temperature reasons during the winter, but you'd probably have to cool them in the summer and you would still have to shield them from the elements during harsh winters -- hence, a shack.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Check out geothermal cooling. Dig about 5 - 7 feet down into the ground and you've got a consistent temperature *year 'round*. The temperature happens to be ideal for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.
It'd be *ultra geek* if you could set up a processor cooler based on this technology.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
How many people actually have rack mounted servers for home use? A cluster I can see, but racks aren't cheap.
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Since you're doing all this wiring, just install some large A/C units and wire them into your nieghbors outlet. To make them less suspicious get a tin box and label it with your local Electric Company's logo.
I only need the Preview button when I haven't used the Preview button.
what if you took the heat generated by the room an suck it into the main vent in the winter (this will heat the rest of the house) and blow the cold a/c air into the room in the summer. This would work very well if the room/closet is very high and narrow. You could also make all the boxes blow air to a back wall and 1 or 2 vents back there.
Carpe meam simiam!
I'm on my 3rd house, which like the previous ones is automated and has several servers, switches, UPSs, etc running 24/7. The truth is that there is not *that* much excess heat generated in a typical scenario. Sure, you can pile up lots of servers to do odd jobs, just to try and make it look like some mini server-room, but that's hardly cost effective, or efficient.
Without knowing the size of the room, the approximate BTU output of the machines and devices, and the heat loss factors of the room, nobody can *really* make any informed decisions.
My sever room and wiring closet is about 6' x 12', which was also about the size of my previous room. I don't do anything special to control airflow or temp. I *do* have a temp sensor in there to monitor things, just in case, but I've found that it tends to stay at about 65F in the winter and about 77F in the summer. Hardly worth spending tons of money to try and regulate the temperature better, I'd rather invest in another lighting controller or touchscreen
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We have a room set up as a "computer room"... Three computers on a lan. We are luck in the fact that the house is wired with rj-45 so making the entire house into one network for every room will not be a problem. Just add a hub outside at the phone connection box, add in a power cable for the hub and presto.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
A good home server room is just as good as the design behind it. That's probably why it's an AskSlashdot question. An apt one, too.
In my home, I set up my server room before we even officially moved in. I can get pics if people desire, but I'll give the gist here.
First, it needs to be in the basement. Some people think it's only a heat issue, but the reality is that server rooms are noisy. I've only got four machines whirring about, and that alone is enough to sound like a wind tunnel.
Second, build shelving such that you can walk around it and access equipment from the rear. How many tower cases have RJ-45 connectors on the front side? Didn't think so. I built shelving out of 2x4's, 3/4" plywood, lag bolts, and drywall screws. Some day I'll get around to putting formica all over everything (it's not that expensive and easy to do). Everything is strong enough to hold me jumping up and down without any wiggle.
Third, carefully design how your wires are going to run. Raceways are a great idea, though you can also go the cheap route and use ziptie loops that have screw holes. Also, network wires should not be in the same raceway (and not parallel) to power cables.
Finally, place your equipment. Servers should be placed where they most make sense, e.g. don't put the internal file server next to the router and the public webserver on the other end. People should get a "feeling" of what your machine's duties are visually. Also, keep networking gear all in the same area--hubs, switches, and even modems and your incoming ISP equipment. That's also the best place for your router.
In addition, consider a KVM. They really are helpful, and cut down a lot on heat (and space needs). Some even have remote extenders--with mine I can work on any machine in my server room from my desktop in my office area. Definitely beats working in the wind tunnel.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I have three computers living in a very tiny closet, which would normally kill all three. The trick I used was that the closet has a removable insulated panel which leads to a non-insulated crawl space. By leaving the panel open by varying degrees I can control the temperature in the closet to reasonable while not freezing my ass off outside of it.
;-)
Another solution if you don't ned physical access, just leave them in an uninsolated room and close the door. Warning though, watch out for the bugs
Bye!
Another suggestion is that when I lived in Salt Lake City our house had water heating. What if you ran pipes behind the computers with fins on the pipes (like a heatsink) then that water could go into the hot water heater. Once again, saving you some money.
Where is the room located physically? Don't forget that an underground external room (as opposed to a room in the middle of the house) will be cooler.
Being true geeks, you're probably not opposed to spending some moolah on this. What about doing something like this guy did? If you buried a few large tanks deep the ground deep so it's below the frost line, you'd get cold water for free. Then just hook all you're PCs into water cooling. Have them all draw from the same spot, and then all empty back in. That way you get free cooling and it'd be quiet. If you look back at my earlier suggestion involving the water heater, you'd be all set.
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You could use heat exchangers, which is basically a nifty bit of pluming or maybe some h/w.
but basically cold does not exist (scientifically) it is mearly a lack of heat. all you have to do is remove the heat from the room to heat the house with, taking heat from then room (ie takes energy out) would make it cold =)
I no guru on whats available, the above came from my physics a-level, and i'm sure some one will point out a mistake and/or expand the idea with more detail
-Trev
...on www.bid4assets.com right now a place is dumping datacenter equipment like liebert coolers and UPS systems for crazy cheap!!!! and they come up in onesys twosys all the time on there. the other item for cooling you could get is from a hotel supply place. get one of thier wall mounted AC units. those things can cool a large area. a friend of mine had one in his workroom in his house. it could get downright nipply in there!!!
Waste heat removal should he either to the exterior of the house in summer or the interior in winter. If you paid for it, you might as well use it to heat your house and not pay twice. Likewise, ventalation to the outside will keep your room within reason unless you get 90+ days where you are. Most commercial server rooms are in the "service core" of a building, do not have the luxery of ready access to lots of cool exterior air and can't do this.
You will want to make sure that you run some sort of humidification in the room. You may wish to include a belt humidifier into your air ducting.
Someone doesn't know their thermodynamics, hmmm....
Fridges and freezers work by pumping the heat out of a certain space (the space inside the fridge/freezer). Guess where that heat goes tho? Outside the back of the appliance. That's why the backs of em are always hot, it's not just cuz' there are "things working back there". The heat that is coming out the back is exactly equivalent to the heat that is being lost inside of the appliance, causing the decrease in temperature.
So, the net heat change by sticking a freezer in a server room is zero ( 0 )! And it'll be just as hot as it was before.
Now, if you were to stick the backside of the freezer outside of the house (cut a hole in the wall) then you would be able to cool the room down. But then all you would have is a not-as-effective air conditioner, and you might as well just buy a window A/C for a couple hundred and get a lot more efficient cooling out of it.
You could open a window in the winter. Why not. A couple of layers of R-45 enclosing the room should insulate it from the rest of the house, setting up an airexchange system through a window ought be a snap. This is assuming the external tempurature will always be at an acceptable level.
No matter what, the R-45 will prevent heat from leaking in or cold from leaking out.
His inability to keep a simple website up and running is matched only by Slashdot's keystone coplike admins.
Easy task if you do it right, and (more) economical than normally thought...
Use an outside wall accessible room
Install a decently powerful, degree settable AC unit for that room only.
Set up two blower units that are thermostatically controlled - one blowing out (top of room), and the other blowing in (other end of room). The one blowing in should have an electronic damper that can be controlled by thermostat (along with it's blower fan). When outside temperature is 10-20 degrees below *desired*inside temp, it blows the cooler air in. if the out venting one can be placed above the biggest heat generators (UPS's, monitors and drive arrays), they should be used to blow the hot air out, causing decent cirulation in the room similar to what IBM does inside their Intellistation and Netfinity server cases.
The AC unit should be set at proper temperature. It will not come on during the winter when outside air is cool enough to cool the room, thus saving that energy.
The dampers and blowers cycling inside air into the room will need to be adjusted based off how much heat you generate. The more heat, the bigger the difference between desired temp and outside temp. We've found on high heat generating scenarios, you want 15 or more degree differences (the key is you dont want to be blowing in air marginally cooler than wanted while the AC is running or the AC is cooling that much more air volume (whatever the fans can blow in, plus the air volume of the room)).
Make sense? I hope so... if not, email me...
Rob
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i think you should be more concerned about
..i haven't seen it
:)
power levels then cooling. its easy to go
out and buy AC units.. i personally use a
APC Networkair 1000. It won't by any
means cool a full server room but it can
take care of 5-6 servers in my wireframe
shelf setup. It can exaust the water either
via an internal holder(insufficient for
running 24/7) or to an external bucket. i
use a rubbermaid cargo holder deal holds
probably 45 gallons. lasts about a week
before i have to empty it. The advantage
to this unit is its quiet(i live in an
dense apt complex). and it doesn't
draw much power (i think max is 6.5amps).
one of my friends got a cheaper AC unit
which provides about 1/4th the cooling
but draws about 12amps(basically an entire
circut). i think the networkair 1000
does about 750BTUs of cooling. the
network air 1000 also requires an
exaust..so ideally you'll need a window
to exaust to(or a raised ceiling).
it can operate without exaust but in
my experience it reduces the efficiency
of the cooling by a good 75%. the air
vent it requires is small, about 8
inches long and 2 inches wide..
so my point is you need power, and a lot
of it for cooling. i spread my systems
accross 3 circuts in my apt luckily i live
in washington state and don't need the
AC during the winter(gets to about 55
in my living room where my systems are).
the Networkair 1000 set me back about
$750 back in march of this year, bought
it from insight.(price included shipping).
my friend got his AC from sears i think
for about $150
since he lives on the other side of
the country, but the fact that it draws
12amps alone would rule it out for me.
1 dedicated circut can handle about 9
systems in my experiece. but i have
to leave overhead for non pc stuff,
especially my 12amp vaccum which likes
to trip the breaker
close the heating vent in that room? don't heat it, but cool it in summer.
The exhaust fan sounds better to me -- most equipment is designed to be air-cooled in a cool-room-temp environment, so dragging the house-air through the room makes sense.
If you want to get really wild -- insulate the interior walls and cut a window, then mount a window air conditioner across the interior wall to pump heat from the server room into the house proper, recycling instead of dumping.
What I did was vent at the top of my server room to a cool hallway and that completely fixed the problem I had. However...
You may not have a cool hallway, etc. You also don't tell us how many computers of what type, size of closet, etc. So the best I think anyone can do is recommend the following:
1. If small amounts of computers/periphs and appropriate ability to vent to a cooler area just do that.
2. Try a small cooling unit (even those that are used for small wine cellars). You will again need to vent to another area.
3. If this is not enough, then you've got some major league requirements and you may as well pay for air conditioning. Don't forget to add in a raised floor while you are at it
In house server room? Prolly phat T1 connections. Just one question... Can I move in?
My Karma ran over your Dogma....
I haven't seen this pointed out up to now, but depending on the placement of this room, you might consider adding some exrta insulation, mostly to deal with noise.
Don't forget that a lot of PCs make a lote of noise, so depending on your sweethalf's state of mind, even the tiniest of noise can be a cause for headeaches. And boy, you DON'T want that to happen...
Also if it's feasable, an oustisde air-duct can be nice for the cooling in the mid seasons, when flowing hot air to the rest of the house gets unpractical, but it's still cooler outside.
Murphy(c)
Is there ever a better answer? I hear CowboyNeal does personal cool-air generation for low hourly rates.
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
Your from Canada so just place cold beers in the same room. Drink Beer as it gets warm and replace with cold ones. Canadian beer is cheep so this will be cheeper and much more fun then trying to AC it.
Does the house have central heating? If you really pack the room with gear, and you have central heating a couple of blowers (squirl cage fans) could be used to push heat from the room back through the ducts to the rest of the house.
11 1GHz+ computers, 2 old workstations, 48 ports of Catalyst goodness and an external RAID enclosure. Most of it in a 10x12 room.
First thing is: Open a goddamn window. Block vents if you're worried about screwing up your heating/cooling bill. Get a little Window AC for summertime - not that you're going to get 100 F summer days in Canada, but just in case you need it. The windows in my apartment building are extra-wide, so I have two box fans sitting side-by-side in my window, one blowing air in, the other blowing out.
Scrounge a rack if you have to - the kind musicians use is cheaper than the ones computer people pay for. I pulled mine out of a dumpster at an Exodus NOC. I have a number of the identical tower cases - so I stacked them at the bottom of the rack, and started the rackmount stuff I have (a disk array, a catalyst 5005, KVM, and big ol' UPS) above that.
Rack-mount stuff costs too much money but I love having everything in one place. I'll bet wooden shelves would be just fine if I didn't have stuff that fit inside the rack already.
A $30 "Hobby" labelmaker works great for keeping cables straight. That and a whole bunch of chicken-straps (cable ties) and variety of velcro implements should be considered essential.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot? In the past I wouldn't consider carpet in an area with lots of computers, but since I'm at home, I'm thinking maybe the noise-deadening features of a good, thick carpet might be a good thing.
I don't pay for electricity (obviously!). I have no idea how much all this stuff costs to run. All my machines are on a UPS, though, which is handy. $99 500VA generic units are better than nothing at all. There's a pretty big electrical load in my tiny little apartment, but I'm lucky in that my computer room has, for some reason, outlets on three different circuits. I should think that having outlets on two circuits would be a minimum, particularly if you're in an apartment or older home, where tripping a breaker is either easier or more likely than a new home.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
we are designing some small datacenters for companies. of course your costs should be kept at a minimum.
1. you do not need to pay any airconditioning anymore (unless you have enough money to run it 24/7/365.)
2. if you are going to place your rack in a small room, make sure that air will come from the bottom front of the rack (air pushing upwards vertically). this will allow for proper colling of racked equipment.
3. vent the heat at the upper rear where all the heat dissipates.
4. for servers, use low power like the tualatin series (700mhz with 1v i think). i suggest that you do not use AMD since they are very hot.
5. for network equipment, they do not generate much heat unless you get the gigabit routing switches with lots of cpu inside.
6. and seriously, when you say that a server/network equipment is high end, they are tested for conditions to work in case there are fan failures and no cooling, etc...
hope this helps you.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
This might be a little to simple but why not just put a window air condetioner in their. I have one in my server room, keeps it cold enough to store beer in with the server. About 60 or so in the summer. I put a duck from the back of the AC unit to an outside vent. Of course my server room is in the atic to puting in a vent was easy
011000011001111
I have four computers neatly hidden in my office. And thats probably wasteful - we could easily get by with two. Who needs a rack full of computers for their house?
1) An understanding wife/husband/SO/roommate. Best to verify this one beforehand.
;-)
2) Space in front AND in back. I've been in a lot of LAN 'closets' and that's what they should have remained - closets. Those open, aluminum patch-panel racks, mounted perpendicular to the wall, allow you to reach those tangled cables. It may not look as good, but you'll thank yourself everytime you have to change/add/delete a cable.
3) Adequate AC power wired in BEFORE the first piece of equipment is installed. Try to picture adding an outlet in 6 months...
4) If your boxen aren't real furnaces, try convection cooling. In a semi-enclosed, freestanding rack, I put the greatest heat-generating equipment at the top, with a wide open vent immediately above. And vent(s) at floor level, to bring in the cooler air.
5) Choose a cool place like a basement. Drawing air up across a cool, concrete slab gives you an advantage from the get-go.
6) Invest in a KVM switch, if you have several servers. Swapping cables all the time is for weenies.
7) Assuming you're using an enclosed rack (or even if you're not), consider wire-mesh shelving. I've gone over to the local Home Depot and purchased that white, vinyl-over-steel stuff for very little $$$. Allows the air to flow nicely.
8) Cable-ties can be your friend. Keep that install something you can be proud to show your wife/husband/SO/roommate. You never know when you might need to justify that second rack....
Do you already have all this equipment, or are you planning to kit out the room after you move in?
.13 micron version of the Athlon MP comes out, you can get a speed boost and a heat reduction in one go, so I'd get the cheapest Athlon MP chips available.) With that amount of CPU horsepower you can do Linux software RAID for free (just make sure each IDE drive has its own controller, i.e. only one drive per cable) and still have lots of power left over for running server software.
If you plan ahead, you ought to be able to set up with all the gear you need, without using too much power/making too much heat.
Start with one big Linux server. Equip it with a ridiculous amount of RAID storage: how about 3 or 4 80 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration; that's 160 GB or 240 GB right there. Use a 2-processor SMP Socket A motherboard, and a couple of Athlon MP chips. (When the
Now I assume you want some number of other computers for various purposes. At a minimum you want one firewall. If you want a server exposed to the net you really want two firewalls, with the net server behind one and your really big Linux server behind both firewalls (and the second one should be really locked down!). For these extra computers, you ought to look at using the Shuttle SV24, with a VIA C3 chip. The SV24 has little expansion capability, so it only has a little power supply, so it only makes a little heat. The C3 dissipates about as much power as a night light ( 7 Watts) typical and 11 Watts max according to the Via web site. You don't even need a fan on the heatsink: a simple passive heatsink is enough for a C3! For firewall use, put an extra net card in the single PCI slot on the SV24.
Because Linux can boot off a floppy (try that with Windows XP Professional Server sometime) you can set up the SV24 boxes with just a floppy and a whole lot of memory. If you can get a net boot working with the built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, you don't even need the floppy.
Of course your personal workstation/gaming boxes can run hot with fast CPUs and fast 3D graphics cards and such, but those probably won't be in the server room!
Unless you are planning to invest in a render farm or Beowulf cluster, you should be able to get everything you need running, and it shouldn't get too hot.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Liebert maked a self-contained rack with built in air conditioning and UPS. Details here.
turn you entire house into the fattest heat sink ever, ya know fill the whole thing up w/ mineral oil, attach a copper roof and put some massive industrial fans on top. although you'd have to invest in some scuba gear... until your body adapts to the oil, wich eliminates the need for conventional eating, you could just mix up some dietary suplements into the oil...
In my house, I have a single server. It shares my cable connection to the rest of the house, serves Samba shares, and until I got sick of walking that far, and realized it was ridiculous, was the print server as well. I can't believe that anyone setting up a *HOME* network would have any valid reason to have that much stuff running in one place (now, you can argue about your kitchen, living room, bathroom, deck, rec, and garage CPU's. Honestly, why the hell would you need all that much for just a house?
Anyway, my server is in a closet in a bedroom used for storage. It sits in that closet [with the door closed, GASP!], and has never crashed. This setup has been running continuously (other than power outages and upgrades) for well over a year now, and it never gets significantly warmer in the closet than the rest of the room/house. I really don't think there are any real concerns for you unless you are legally insane, and actually need to run seven computers to serve a house.
Now, if you are using your house for a server farm for your own employment, that is another issue. In which case, I'd retract the insanity and question your intellect about marketing (not a lot of people want to trust in someone who operates their ISP and/or web hosting out of a house. You can talk all you want about bottom line, but they are going to question your seriousness, and finacial stability. I know I wouldn't trust someone who didn't at least have a business presence that I could walk into to yell at someone when something wasn't getting done.
As long as these computers have a joystick port you could allways use thermistors
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 9The Thermistor just needs to be inserted into pins 1 and 3 on the joystick port. Writing a program to poll the thermistor is easily done in just about any platform, I know everything from basic to C++ has joystick reading routines.
If you want to over engineer it more than that, you could always add a potentiometer and fine tune the thermistor value to the actual ambient temperature (READ a thermometer, then adjust the pot till the value returned from the joystick port matches it)
PS I did have a cool little ansi diagram but the lameness filter killed it
This is just a regular house and not an office right? Big servers mainly are used to handle hundreds and even thousands of users at once. An old pentium pro or even pentium1 can be fine for a file server or a web server. With improvements from the 2.4 linux kernel and freebsd around, you can make a scalable server easily with an old p166 with just 64 megs of ram. An example is the link ( too lazy to print it) here on slashdot with the linux powered christmas tree. A single pentium100 with only 64 megs of ram running the newer 2.4 kernel survived the slashdot effect running dynamic perl cgi scripts. Pretty impressive.
I believe connection bandwith is going to kill a webserver in your home more then computer hardware. The benchmarks you read here on slashdot that are conducted in labs are tested with multiple gigbit ethernet connections fiber connections to simulate loads from backbones of huge networks. A T1 I believe has a max bandiwith of only 1.5 megs a second and a good dsl line barely give you 1 to 2 megs of data a second if your lucky enough to live close to a CO. Basically, even an old pentium100 will likely sit mostly idle while your dsl gets saturuated with data. In other words a server room may be overdoing it.
You only need a 486 for a firewall, an old pentium1 or pentium2 for a web server and another pentium1 or 2 for a fileserver. If you want you can even build a dual filserver/webserver combo if your wallet is hurting. Buy some some 20-40 gig scsi drives and an old scsi-2 adapter( you will never use all the nadwith of a scsi 160, unless you want to use raid) for a few hundred dollars and stick them in the file server or webserver and your done. No need for a server room here. Of course its nice to play around with old hardware so maybe a lab in the basement may suffice for goofing around but i doubt it would ever get really hot. Older hardware tends to run alot cooler then modern hardware with a few exceptions( cough pentium60). A pentiumII 233 fileserver will always stay cool. Even when running at %100 utilization. May pentiumIII700 is always cool to the touch. Newer hardware today in my opinion is overclocked crap and I wouldn't buy it for any of your servers. I am glad I am not in the new market for a pc today. Infact I believe no computer should even be cooled with a cpu fan. If it needs a fan then its overclocked in my book. The computer rooms that run really hot have 20-100 servers all closely racked together in a small area. Only corporate and university users run anything like this.
http://saveie6.com/
Ummm, you don't bury the computers, you bury about a mile of poly tubing, and circulate a water / glycol mix. Hook that up to an old AC core (or a new one, it's your money...) and you
have yourself a basic heat transfer system. Add a compressor and you have a heat pump. Big project, and expensive (cost of digging deep enough and tubing). If you heat / cool you whole house this way, it may pay for itself.
What I did for my room, was add a few electic dampers, duct blowers, thermostats, and a few relays and you have yourself a REALLY simple climate conrtol system.
You have 4 ducts: exhaust to outside, fresh outside air (filtered), furnace (a/c), and furnace return. Use thermostats to control which ducts are active based on temps inside, outside, etc.
When it's cold outside, you have free AC. When it's warm, you tap off the main house AC. Dual zone control on furnaces are common. I don't care how cold it gets in the room, so heating isn't required (it doesn't get below 30 outside here, and the server room. You can't actually recycle the waste heat as the room is ALWAYS cooler than I normally keep the rest of the house.
I actually have a new modern furnace and A/C that can run at 3 different levels which works awesome for this project. I also have an electronic air cleaner, and run the blower 24/7/365 filtering the house air (allergies...)
Yessssssssss!!!! I've waited so long for this!
BTW Zepplin rules!!!!!!!!!
To cool your mini server room try an APC Network Air system, they have really huge expensive ones, and then this one: apc.com. Little expensive, but it cools the room down and takes moisture out of the air. They have a vent duct you have to run outside though, and you'll want to get the kit to hook the dehumidifier to a pipe or something that drains outside, because at .26Gallons of water per hour, with its tiny reservoir it can fill up fast, although it seems like it shuts off the dehumidifier if the tank gets full.
-Ryan
Heat /p4 servers), the equipment can probably survive without active room cooling. Internal cooling of the cabinets may have to be beefed up, especially multi harddisk systems (cheap to do though).
/at jobs.
/router at night, is probably the safest firewall you can get;-)
Unless the room is broom-closet sized, or you got a lot of equipment (more than 5 or 6 Athlon
Perhaps some creativity may help too. Perhaps some of the systems doesn't need to run 24/7.
Some BIOS's have an internal timer and calender, so you can shutdown the systems when likely not in use.
WoL (Wake on LAN) to remote boot, suspend or shutdown systems can be nice too (almost all nics and mobos support WoL nowadays).
Hook it up with some X10 gadgets and a sensor, so that the system(s) boot, if you go near your bedroom console at night, or you alarm clock goes of in the morning, or if you start your coffe machine after 2 o'clock in the night, or...
Other power management features may be present in the OS, so you can suspend the entire system, or just the harddisks, by a cron
Not only will you save some money, but the room will run cooler too.
And unless you run your own DNS, mailserver, etc, then a shut down firewall
Dust
This is my nemesis at the moment, our server room is in a basement, with an untreated cement floor.
I suspect our DAT and some other stuff, died because of the cement dust (ok, so DATs always break down after a short while, but..). Anyway, fans and PSU's seems like dustmagnets, which again leads to worse internal component cooling, so a clean room, without carpets is my recommendation.
Noise
All your equipment will make an infernal noise, and a generally bad indoor clima in the room. Of course, people have very individual sensitivity to this, but personally I prefer to hack outside the serverroom.
I final note, if you run a Linux box, then I can only recommend netsaint, from www.netsaint.org.
It is a very flexible, very reliable monitoring system. Since it checks services with plugins, it is easely extensible to include eg. room temperature measurement. Netsaint is simply the best of the pack.
Oh, a minor thing more; we have never regrettet our small investment in a handheld labeling machine. A small label saying "Cross-over" on a Cat cable or "UPS" on a power cord, saves a lot of trouble.
No, No... you use a heat pump. Some systems are designed to work with ground temperature differential vs. coolant temperature.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
What we did in power plants is to have our rack mounts in sealed cases. the set up a peltzer colling sandwich through the walls of the case with heatsinks on the inside and outside.
My current home server room has a window so I am building an thermo controlled set of fans to vent to the outside (or reverse) this way the main house
system works and I use the outside as the dumping ground. In winter though I just through a fan in the door way and heat the house.
I think the best idea is to tune the vents int the room and the house and let it go. Just rememeber
that you must have air circulation back to the air handler unit. ( or out a window.)
Coward
to keep it cool is simply only run A/C in the house. Yeah, it's canada and will be cold for 10 months out of the year, but you can always put on a sweater!
bleh
It shouldn't be too difficult for you to set up some thermostatic switches to control the system. Just make it blow cold air (even from outside) into the server room when it's needed and blow the hot air into the rest of the furnace system when you need that in the rest of the house.
If the server room is going to be in the basement, you probably could just put a blower vent going into the main flume from near the ceiling of the server room, and then spill the cold air from the rest of the house (or just some of it) into the server room, again from the ceiling. Then it'll be the coolest room in the house, and not just because it has a bunch of computers!
Here's another tip, put the hot-air sucker near the outside wall, and the cold air blower nearer to the center of the house. That'll keep the air moving and thermoclining (layers of different temp air).
Good luck!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Well you have a furnace don't you. I have a fairly spacieous and well sealed furnace room. In your instance take advantage of that.
:] ). An
Go to Home Depot get a register T and insert it into the cold air intake coming into the room. Add a booster fan ( be sure that is sucking air down and not blowing it up, its a cool idea to suck all that warm air out... its also a cool idea to keep that furnace with enough oxygen so it doesnt' go and kill you with carbon monoxide.)I left the remainder of the intake pipe going back down to the furnace so I was simply tapping into the air supply and not diverting the entire flow.
Next create a simple register system that blows down on the back of the systems, get some straight register pieces and some elbows, its just like connecting straws together. The furnace should easiely handle the excess heat ever time it kicks in. You can also throw in a standard thermostat in and set the furnace fan to summer mode, so it will kick in whenever the temp goes above a certian tempature.
Now you could also go a step further and encase the systems into a sealed box ( essentially we thought about getting some plywood and making like a small sealed shed in my furnace room, and then forcing the air out with a second fan that would runn the air directly to the air intake of the furnace.) The only warning is don't try and force the exhausted air out through the chimmney for the furnace... why you ask.. because you don't wanna mess it up and again...and say, flood your house with deadly generally unnoticable furnace exhaust.
and then attatching a standard register booster fan to my incoming air chimmey ( which anyone with a furnace will have its required by law, although i don't know if modifying it is legal..
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
I think this is they key. If you put your stuff in a naturally cool room with normal ventilation, you'll be fine.
The dude that posted the comment about cost of electricity for your servers made a good point. I estimate that my router and mp3 server cost me at least $20/month. I'm working on setting up power management for them, since they're not needed from like 2am - 8p.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
1. Place your servers so the back is facing you, not the wall. People never need to go to the front of the machine anyways.
2. For regular machines, cut a big 5 inch hole on the top and place a fan there. This will keep your machine running even in 100 degree heat.
3. Little secret: Laptops make real great servers. They are compact, have a built in UPS, hideaway keyboard mouse, and display, and are engineered better than thebig boxes.
Related, anyone know where I can get inexpensive (or gently used) rack cases, similar to (or exactly) what they use to move around rack-mounted audio gear? Y'know - the felt or carpet padded 19" rack cases on wheels? I've moved so many times over the past few years that I'd be able to make sure my rack mounted gear survives nicely in something like this. Better yet - I can just leave it setup in the case on a permanent basis, and can get rid of the short rack. The online musician's stores have these, but it's more than I'm looking to spend.
Thanks.
First, and foremost, what in the hell are you gonna do with all that Stuff?? I mean, I'm a geek too and all, but towers and racks and all that other stuff? I'd say put the money towards the mortgage...
:-)
2) My Server is in the basement. Due to it being underground, it stays around 50-55 F down there, wether it's 105F or -5 F outside. You should keep a de-humidifier in the visinity (but on a different circuit if possible) so your machines get nice dry cool air to suck in.
3) As a test last winter, I took a length of dryer hose (ya know the 4" or so wide stuff). I put it out a window (and carboarded up the rest of the open window. I taped the other end to a hole in the front of my PC where I have a mod to have a big fan right there. ~30F outside, ~50F in the box... Even after a few hours of Q3a.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I guess most of us reading and posting on this story have several machines at home. I have three machines on "active duty" (main workstation, DSL-gateway and webserver) and two more that are basically collecting dust except for when I want to test something unusual. A number of projects to get them into active use culminated with a beowulf, but that was a short w00t. (Whee, I have a beowulf! Now I can...I can...*crickets*).
Now I'm down to 5 machines, the all-time high was 8, and most of the recent leftovers are being donated to the family instead of ending up in the "next box" box.
Three units makes sense to me. It allows for all sorts of network testing and experimenting, so for a computer professional/hobbyist it's still rational.
What I'd like to know is what use you guys find for that 4th, 5th, 12th machine? I know from personal experience that "just for the heck of it" can be a good motivator to add another old machine the the net, but I'd enjoy it greatly if someone could elaborate on their far-out home setups, and perhaps spread some inspiration to the rest of us?
You just purchase a small window mounted air conditioner. Keep the door closed and set it to run and keep that room at 65 degrees. Make sure to seal any vents to the room and you should be ok.
You're serious about this? in the middle of winter I think you're crazy.
During the summer, however, it becomes important. Check out home hardware for heating vents that attach to the furnace, then acquire a powerful 110v fan. I got one by chance. I wired it to one end of the venting, and then on a window I cut out a board, opened a window enough for the summer and insulated it so bugs can't get in, then cut a hole in the board for the other end to vent. Then I simply placed the fan closest to the two computers I have running all the time. It's a noisy beasty, but it works.
We already have a massively ethernet wired house... but we made a mistake in our design...
Next house we design will have the in house networking and that server room you speak of; however, we plan on harnacing that heat to help regulate the temperature throughout the house.
...focus on the noise. The heat in cooling problems are easily solved by opening and closing the vents. The noise of rackmounted equipment is intolerable. My last rackmount had to have all the fans in the server *and* the power supply unit quieted just so I could think in my office. Heating and cooling are easy...focus on the noise.
Play Well
Place the racks on turntables with bookcases on the other side. Build a nice antique-looking table where the front cover slides to reveal the keyboard(s) and raises the monitors to a comfortable 45 degree reading angle. You've seen the Bond movie: "Just Like Home." Add the door switch or motion sensor for the alarm system so all screens go to screen-saver mode with your official looking logo (RCMP?) popping up as the lighting changes to red. (AKA, a recent JAG episode.) Others have answered the cooling question, but this will have your friends, clients, police, etc, saying "COOL!" Bob
If you have a Sam's Club and a membership (or know someone who does) you can buy Gorilla Racks for $60 each. They're 7 feet tall, 3 or 4 feet wide, steel and wood and heavy enough to park a truck on them.
I like to use them for servers, UPSs and other things that don't mount in a 19" rack. They're nice because you can mount power strips to them and configure the shelves any way you like.
I built a server room at work that has around 30 servers, routers and associated hard ware. A window air conditioner, which runs 90% of the time in the summer and 10% of the time in the winter, is more than enough to keep the temperature stable.
BTW, make sure to leave monitors turned off. When I built the server room, it was initially my office. Since it's in an unheated building, it would be very cold (50 degrees F) in winter when I came in in the morning. After turning on two monitors for about an hour, the temperature would be around 65. Monitors generate alot of heat.
One thing to find out BEFORE you begin mounting expensive electronic equipment down in your nice, cool basement is:
HOW PRONE ARE YOU TO FLOODING?
My parents place was in a well developed subdivision with one decent power drop and one shitty one. Guess which one they were on?
So every time they'd get a bit of rain, BOOM. Out would go the power in their place, and every place down the right-hand side of the block. While our next door neighbors off to the left (and down the left side of the block (we were at the end of a cul-de-sac) had power.
Consequently, if this happened in the middle of the night, they'd take on 3-4 feet of water.
If you're in an area that has no flooding problems, you're set. You can drop your setup down in the basement.
If you live in an area that's flood prone, then take the extra time and money to rig the server room on the main floor.
Have a cold-air return in the floor (or low on the wall) blowing directly into the equipment bay. Then (assuming you're in a one story home), have a ceiling ventilation fan above the rack.
You can find a lot of HVAC supplies to improve your climate control here. Look particularly closely at the duct fans.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
PPC bases machines generate much less heat (many from Apple don?t even have fans in the power supply)
Also you will save cash on electricity.
Form more info see linuxppc.org or imaclinux.net
My potential server room will be (If my mother agrees, of course) a box of about 0.5*0.5*2 meters located above the passway to the standard micro Soviet kitchen of Khrushchev epoch. Really, in winter (-31 deg. Celsius day temperature NOW) I can drop the heat into the kitchen, it's enough.
But in summer! Street temperatures are higher than +30C, and with my $100/month budget it's difficult to buy a split-system air conditioner.
The decision is very simple: There is always a lot of cold water in the tap. I only need a used car radiator and a fan. Add the thermostatic controller and electromagnetic valve according to taste. The water tariff is flat here, and the water from Lake Baikal is always cold. Of course, if the aquifer is being repaired, you are out of luck.
There really are too many options for this regarding heating/cooling: a lot depends on the systems people in your local climate use.
A lot of posters here assume because you live in Canada it won't get hot; but 40 C / 105 F is considered average summer maximum where I live, and it's way north of 49.
Since we are considering basement, try routing a cold water line to the room. Find a suitable radiator and hook up a 12V automotive electric fan. You can have the fan thermally switch off and on, and your temp sensor can be anywhere on/in/around your servers/racks and will switch at pretty much any temp you choose. This will work winter/summer.
An el-cheapo radiator needn't be much more than a coil of copper tubing although there are many options; an old steam-heat radiator converted to low pressure; a copper pipe/aluminum sheet sandwich affair, whatever.
I strongly suggest you maintain a cooler room in summer and winter. No need to heat it much (if at all) in winter, though. Try to maintain a nice 15 C / 60 F air temp in the room.
It may seem silly to "waste" that heat in winter, but you should really consider excess heat from this particular source a hazard to your pocketbook; the cooler they run the longer they last and CPU's are terribly expensive and inefficent heaters.
Wow, the answers you've gotten.
A window unit air conditioner can be found for under a hundred dollars if you catch it on sale.
Everybody from Lowes and Home Depot to K-Mart and Wal-Mart sells them.
You know, where the inside is bigger than the outside? Just like the TARDIS? What about the sonic screwdriver? You need one of those.
Talk to at least two reasonably intelligent contractors. One problem
related to the geothermal method is
radon, check that you aren't screwing
around in a lung cancer causing
radon daughter locale. Another is
water in your basement. Both of these
are issues in my basement, after
mitigating the radon and digging a
huge french drain in the back yard,
I personnally wouldn't f#ck with
trying to get geothermal heat transfer.
I have to admit when its cold outside and the heats on it get too toasty in
the server room. I think I work on
balancing the system.
I live in florida so my advice is buy a fucking window airconditioner! My room generally stays at 77 degrees as long as I stay the hell out of there (the rest of the house is set at 72). But when I turn on my monitor, a couple of extra boxes, fire up the TV/VCR or sterio, and sit there breathing the temperature rises to at least 82. Shirtless, I have a fan blowing on my back. Another fan nailed to the ceiling blowing hot air out the door, another fan outside the room on the floor blowing cool air into the room, and another small fan blowing up at my nutsack. This generally keeps me from sweating and the temperature around 78.
Its important to keep your nutsack cool. Generally if your nutsack is cool, then so are you. I often just sit there in my underwear. Its a disgusting sight.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I don't totally understand this. First of all, why wire anything, when wireless networks now provide or will soon provide all the bandwidth anybody could want? If you are going to wire the network, at least use home-run wiring and conduit so you can pull the cable you'll need when the next networking technology comes along.
Secondly, exactly what are you going to be doing on these servers? If they're going to be file servers, remember that you easily get 1TB across 2 normal mid-tower cases now. Even if you're serving video, that should be more than enough.
Now, if you happen to have a PDP-8 lying around that you want to install, then all bets are off. But, for anything inside of a typical person's budget, I don't think you have much to worry about.
If you're really concerned, though, get one of the whole-house generators that take over when your power goes out. Use that and local UPSs to keep everything going.
In my server room (AKA my bedroom) I have 2 sun UltraSparc boxes (main desktop and screw around box) 2 athlon boxes over 1gz (file/print/compile box and windows desktop box) and a low end pII (gateway/firewall). In the summer without the AC the temp. is usally equal to whatever it is outside. I have huge fans on the athlon boxes and fans on the drives, so they stay ok internaly. Never had any systems locking up for heat-related problems. With an 8000 btu ac temp is very comfortable, even for sleeping. During the winter the room gets cold, so the computers actually heat the room (no radiator in it) so it works out pretty well. Only downside is the sound of all the computers on at the same time, but after a while you geet used to it. Now, when i am sleeping elsewhere i miss it...
***There is no point in asking, you'll get no reply***
[Snip]
char without opening a window;
[Snip]
SubmitStoryForSure(without opening a window);
end.
This is almost funny
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
This sounds very similiar to what I set up when moving into my new house. My house was freshly built and the basement is below ground in the front of the house and exposed in the back with patio doors that lead outside.
d ex .cfm?base_sku=AP7003&language=en&LOCAL.APCCountryC ode=us
I wired 16 CAT5 outlets into the drywall walls. During contstruction of the walls, a small room was built around the furnace and hot water heater that also houses a 3.3kW (5kva) Powerware UPS and the router equipment for a T1. I have 1 7' rack of equipment and several free-standing servers.
The 1/2 below ground offers some natural cooling... in fact, during the summer and winter months it is not a problem. In the winter, I close all of the furnace vents and the machines keep the basement at around 65-70 degrees F. During the summer the AC vents had to be closed prior to moving in the equipment because it got so cold... but the machine balance it out nicely. The problem is during the periods of the year that the A/C in the house doesn't run and the outside temp is not low enough to keep the room cool. These times can easily be controlled by a window A/C unit.
If you have no windows or more of a problem with cooling/heating, you may want to look at the APC NetworkAIR 1000 unit... it is a spot enviro unit that runs around US$1000.00.
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_in
If you use MacOS X servers then you do not need elaborate cooling. They are based on processors that do not need to run hotter than hell just to perform. I run X servers and they are great for my uses. If you must have a few hot x86 boxen then blow a small room fan on them. When I move into a house I am planning on putting the servers, routers, switches into the basement, in Minnesota we have real basements because the earth freezes so deep in the winter, basements are cool year round and are usually concrete or cinder block, put metel shelves on those and the steel cooled by the concrete coold the boxen. Again a small room fan will also help a lot.
-entropic
First off, congrats on the house. Second, think cheap and efficient. Here is what I did for an old Victorian House converted into an office space.
:)
I took one of the basement rooms that had access to one (in your case try for two) outside wall. It had a small window in the wall (explanation later) and was next to the electrical feeds to the house. I then went to a moving company, a packing company, FedEx, a mall, and any other place I could find that "THREW AWAY STYRAFOAM." I then went to my local Lowes Home Improvement Store (Home Depot is a lot more expensive here) and purchased enough fiber board (fiberglass sheet rock) to cover the room (ALL 6 sides, yes floor and ceiling also). I also picked up several palets, 2x4's, and cinder blocks (Check your area, I am sure you will find someone who will want to GIVE you palets). I had a box fan but picked up one more later. I (the company) purchased a dehumidifier (small one) and extra GFI electrical sockets. Now the details.
Make a box frame from the 2x4's so you can nail on the fiber board (ceiling and walls). Then put up half of the fiber board to cover half of the walls. Put in as much styrofoam you can without bulging the wall. Do this for all walls and ceiling. Don't forget to put in the wall sockets and leave room for some ducting to the outside window. Once you have all the walls and ceiling covered, put down the palets, spacing with cinder block (for floor support), and cover with remaining fiber board (cover with carpet from Goodwill) as needed. Viola! A space made of mostly cheap but heat sensitive materials.
For the next trick, you may need to get a helping hand on this (my friend is an HVAC installer so I cheated a little). Make a box with sheet metal, that can enclosed the dehumidifier, with a box fan on both ends (Leave one unbolted so you can change and maintain the dehumidifier, and make sure both fans are blowing in one direction). On one end of the "central" air unit (exhaust end), add some ducting to go to the room with some ducting for return air to the window with intake vents. Have the other end ducted to the window. Plug in the air unit, plug in your desk lamp, install servers, and #!. One server room. We have 49 Linux servers, 4 oracle/sun boxen (big mothers), two exchange servers (yuck), and one Linux workstation acting as firewall, dhcp,etc.
Temp spikes to 68 degrees during the summer but actually stays fairly warm in the winter (49 degrees).
Just what I did, but add/subtract materials as needed.
"When you really want a good server, make your own"
So many posts here seem to think it's weird that a geek would want a hardware room. Of course you want a place for all your extraneous electronic crap. And although one tries to buy heat-efficient gear, sometimes you run across something that's too interesting to pass up -- maybe an old rackmount server, maybe a bunch of video editing gear, maybe a pinball machine. And of course, there will be the various routers, modems, etc. that stack up over time. I have in front of me three different DSL routers, for example, plus two analog dialout routers and various modems, that have accumulated from different ISP packages -- when they give you the router for free, you take it. (If you throw it out, inevitably you wind up needing it.) And of course I have several printers, scanners, a plotter, Raritan switchboxes, midi hardware, hubs, an 8-track recorder, and plenty of old 'servers' that are only servers because I don't use them as desktops.
:) Get it?
The comments about window air conditioners sound right, though modern hardware is environmentally very rugged, so if you are using a glorified closet, it's still probably OK. You might consider a little circulation fan to blow hot air into the rafters (I did this in my phone/cable closet).
Bottom line: you may not truly need a server room, but you need a workshop, and it's often easier from the standpoint of spousal harmony to call it a server room: "Honey, we need this for technical reasons."
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
If you have hot air ducts, you can place a fan in them so as to always suck air from the room and distribute heat to the rest of the building. This would be helpful for upper floors, for example.
a better solution would take air from the top of the room, and draw it into the basement, near the floor. This would lead to warmer floors in the morning, and circulate the air and heat through out the house.
Of course, a lot depends on house design, but you get the idea.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here are a few things that can make a room more livable
Put up a couple of 4 bulb ( 400W ) chandaliers and put them on a dimmer. You can have comfortable dim light for keyboarding etc. or bright light for fishing dammits out of whatyamacallits. I got two of these type of lights from Home Depot closeout in the lighting department for about $25 each.
There is high-capacity adjustable shelving that uses the rails that you screw to the walls and has movable brackets. This makes handy bookshelves above your work surface area.
I organized my room with corner work units in two corners ( seperated by the long wall of the room ) with matching tables between them along the walls and returns on the short side. The side of the room without the computer tables has a book case, a stereo rack and a horizontal filing cabinet with the fax machine and guitar amp on it. Guitars hang on the wall above the amp for easy access. In the center of the room is a dining table - a good place to lay out diagrams, photos or build boxen.
KVM switches for the two main work areas help cut down the clutter, a few other computers have their own monitors etc. Carpet on the floor may not be the best for dust control, but it is cozy for bare-footed living. Get a vacuum with a hepa filter on the exhaust.
If you are building the house and wiring the room for the purpose of being a computer room, think about putting the data outlets up at 36" or so off the floor, so you can wire stuff on the desk without crawling around to pull cables. Remember to pull several dedicated 20 Amp power circuits - figure out what you are going to run and make sure you have enough amps to support it all plus some. Do not let the electrician share the computer room power circuits with other bedrooms or the kitchen.
I have decided to power down stuff I am not using due to the combination of noise and the now high cost of power. $.25 per KWH at the high tier - and I had about 365 KWH of high tier last month! $ 300 electric bill and that is with a gas clothes dryer, water heater and cooktop. ( that is with 11 people in the house however )
If you have the money, consider building photovoltaic co-generation into your home. It might prove very wise over the long term.
enough is too much
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned that I saw when I worked at IBM was to use a false floor. If you raise the floor 6-12 inches on a simple framework, and use removeable tiles, you can run cables and cords from anywhere to anywhere and not worry about tripping.
In fact, they not only used this technique in their server farms, but also in the production line. When they added on to the line, they dug a 8-foot hole, and then built scaffolding and a false floor. All the plumbing and wiring run under it.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
http://www.netstumbler.com/
I took the second bedroom in my condo and turned it into a server room for $900 (much to my wifes displeasure). I used Anthro furniture which is very strong and cheap, then added one 19" rack for the rackmount stuff. The Anthro furniture is on wheels so running cables is pretty easy since you can roll out the tables to get at the equipment, if you leave enough cable length. Zip ties keep everything neat and I threw in an AirPort base station for living-room-notebook surfing. I've got about a dozen servers with Kingston removable drive trays so I can play with new OS installations without introducing new boxes into the room. An Aeron chair makes the whole setup look very trendy (NOT included in the $900) but half the servers are recycled junk from the MIT Flea Market. Cooling hasn't been a problem with a window-mounted air conditioner and water-coolers for the overclocked units.
I built a small office with a 12'x6' server room. Initially, I attempted to cool it with ducting from the main of the heating/cooling system. There were two problems: 1) inadequate cooling even during the summer/AC season, and 2) no AC in the winter.
To solve the problem, I installed a Sanyo AC unit. This unit has a 18"x5' air handler that mounts inside and a small AC compressor that mounts outside. Only a 2" diameter hole plus a smaller hole for power was necessary between the inside and outside units. It works great!
The only drawback was price: about $7000 with installation.
I just stubled on this, maybe it'll help.
I'd like to see someone try positioning their computers by uptime! "Noooo, don't plug the vacuum in there... ah crap."
Sounds like the name of a warez site...
Also, we figure this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night (without opening a window)"
Open the door, and let that heat warm up the rest of your house. There's no reason to burn natural gas to heat the rest of your home, and waste electricity cooling down that one room.
I took the easy way out. I just decided to run the fan on my HVAC all the time. This does a few things for me:
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I have over twenty machines, two switches, and two routers running in the basement of my house. The BTU output is many time more then the space heater in the den. The temps of these machine never each the danger level, becuase of nature convention, of course. Most of the problems of cooling comes from putting to many machines into too small of space. Such as seven severs in a 10 * 12 bedroom, or twenty machine in a five by four closet.
Having the server in a large room such as the basement which is 60 feet by 15 feet means that heat genrated by the server will rise and move towards the cooler side of the basement. The cool air will move towards the servers, thus creating a nature cooling environment. This solution has worked wonders and cost nothing.
The journey is better then the end.
Here's a funky idea that may actually cut your heating and electical bills to boot.
... processors, power supplies, graphics chips. run a supply of water (or other coolant) through them and transfer the heat to the hot water supply of the house.
Strip out all of the fans and other cooling apparati and attach cooling plates to all of the really hot components
This will save money on electricity because you won't be running fans all the time to push the hot air around, and it will save money on gas (or electricity) used to heat hot water. Money can also be saved on the construction/purchse of the equipment because you won't have to purchase extra fans and heat sinks.
Also, using it to heat or pre-heat hot water is a good idea because you use hot water year-round
Here's a link to a company who specializes in this kind of equipment. Found it on Google.
http://www.lytron.com/
There are two primary issues that you need to be concerned about - heat removal and electricity. Both of these should be designed into consideration for the room to begin with. Since your building the house, you have an opportunity to deal with these properly to begin with. This should save you thousands of dollars vs trying to hodgepodge things together after the fact.
The first consideration is to make sure that you have an ample supply of electricity to the room. This involves more than just having a bunch of outlets all over the place. The first thing that you MUST do is to have adequate gauge electrical wire running to the room from your circuit box (make sure circuit breakers are adeqaute as well). If this isn't adequate, you won't pass inspection. You can't use the same gauge wire that you can get away in the rest of the house. You need a lower number gauge, and more of it. The primary consequences of failing to do this will be an inability to run everything at once without tripping a circuit breaker. I recommend having at least two dedicated runs of wire to the server room. Make sure their breakers are labeled and control nothing else. Also have a dedicated smoke detector hardwired for this room (the insurance company will like / require this and it will help for your safety as well.
There are also code issues here. If the wiring is inadequate and your house burns down from this (circuit breakers can fail to trip) your insurance company won't pay you a dime. If the electrician tells you not to worry about this, things will be fine, tell him to do it anyways. Follow up on this by physically verifying that the gauge is different. Remember the electrician who does your house is judging by the standard of what the typical urban household needs. It is important to remind him that this is not the typical urban house. If done during construction the cost will be minimal, if done after construction (drywall) the cost will be thousands of dollars. Also consider having one or two 220 volt outlets installed during this time. If you need to install a room air conditioner for your server room you'll need this. You'll also likely want a single heavy duty UPS for all of the equipment vs several smaller ones. Such a UPS will also require 220 Volt power. All of this will probably not add more than $200 if it is done before drywall goes up and while the electrician is on site anyways. One other thought here, make sure said wire gauge differences are documented and signed by the electrician, and then videotape everything before the drywall goes up.
Now that you have power in place you'll want to examine heat removal issues. If you put this in a basement, it will naturally be about 10f cooler. This can be used to your advantage. Keeping this room in the center of the house will also help keep it cooler / warmer for less costs. Keep in mind that the standard home AC unit will not be sufficient to cool such a room. Talk to the HVAC contractor and start by getting dedicated ducts that go to this room only (not a feed from another duct). Tell them what the room while be used for and they can help out, it's something that is pretty common for any contractor that also does commercial work (avoid HVAC contractors that only do residential work like the plague). It will also help if the room has a higher than average ceiling (give the heat somewhere to go) and a ceiling fan to help pull hot air up. You also want to keep the run (length of duct from AC unit to room) as absolutely short as you can get away with.
Consider getting a purpose built building interior air conditioner for the room. They cost about a grand, but don't have to have dedicated ductwork available to them. They are also far cheaper than failed components if you get a sudden hot day that overwhelms your air conditioner. Remember that standard air conditioners are sized to handle not the hottest days in your locality but a point that is 85% - 90% equivalent to the hottest days (there are good reasons for this, but I'd be getting off topic). In other words, don't count on the home AC to handle this room. It's not just a matter of being comfortable, it's a matter of avoiding replacing failed hardware that got too warm. This always ends up costing more than it would cost to do it right in the first place.
Now you can deal with the smaller issues. Make sure you have lots and lots of 4 bang outlets. Also make sure that you have indirect lighting in the room. It may be worthwhile to install some foam for noise absorption while your at it. It's not very expensive and it can make a big difference. You also want to make sure the floor is wood, tile or concrete. Avoid carpet that can create static electricity. Make sure you have your wiring coming to the room through PVC or steel conduit. Make sure the access point isn't going to be blocked. From here I would advise to go ahead and buy a rack. It will save lots of space, the standard is there for many things, and it will make things look much nicer. You can also set up a proper patch panel this way.
Just my 2 and a half cents worth, would add more but this is long as is.
I personally have two machines - one being nothing but a firewall and router and the other being all those handy services that you need on a home network (file storage, DNS, web proxy, testing DB and web server, etc).
There are good reasons for this split of duties:
In summary - home networks needs 2 machines - one providing security, one providing services.
Don't forget to seal the room, and breathe deeply while inside. Natural radon gas filtration in your lungs. The rest of your house and its occupants will love the radon exposure also. Why test on animals? You can be the perfect case study.
I'm not an expert but can't an airconditioner be used to solve this? I guess there are aircontioners that can do the thing and don't cost too much???
Use vinyl storm drain! Less than 25cents/ft, a variety of colors (provided you count beige and white as colors, and "2" as "variety"), and you can get even angled connectors for that anal-tidy look.
You can get fancy brackets, or just buy extra-long drywall screws and drive them through the middle.
Depending on how often you recable, you can either put runs of twine inside for expansion, or cut a lengthwise slit
cheers,
mike
If you want it done right, all you have to do is find a room in the house that you don't need and be prepared to spend several thousands of dollars to prepare it like any proper server facility.... raised floors, fire retardant, probably cabinets, dedicated aircon... the usual.
No heat, no air, no insulation. At least 3 computers (usually more), 2 switches, 1 router, a laser printer, and micellaneous other electronics (amps, lights, etc..) on 24/7/365. Santa Cruz, CA. Never had a heat failure, ever. I really don't think you need to worry too much unless you're are talking about hundreds of pieces of equipment in an insulated room.
This sounds really cool, but I can't seem to form a good mental image of it. Have you got any diagrams or pictures of your system? Or of the geothermal system?
Dyolf Knip
Being really short on space, I had to move 3 of the servers into the laundry room - since there wasn't any real space there, I stacked them end to end and slid them between the washer/dryer and the wall. I was worried about heat initially, but it hasn't been a problem at all. (The webserver has an uptime of 115 days with no problems.)
I have a picture at http://mmdc.net/servers.jpg
The one on top is 'unagi', the web server and mp3 server. (Redhat 7.1) below that is the router (Freesco) and another test machine below that.
It keeps everything out of sight and quiet and uses the 10cm of space that would be otherwise wasted. I could add probably 3 more if I needed, too.
I use webmin and have VNC on each, so I don't need a keyboard or monitor, but I can put a flatpanel on the metro shelf facing it if the need arises.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Unless I am mistaken you said you live in Canada. The land of ice and snow (according to what I am told). Why are you worried about your computers overheating? Spend the extra $$ you are thinking about for cooling your computers on EXTRA insulation for the rest of the house!!! The $$ saved over the life of the house will pay off big time and you will help the environment by spending less fossil fuels on heating and cooling. Also, invest in spending $$ on computers the produce less heat, and use less power. Use less monitors, and KVM switches. Your 100 watt 21" monitor uses tons more power and produces tons more heat than that 5 watt Athlon. If they must produce heat, have it use the heat for good. The suggestions of using the heat to feed the inlets on the heaters is VERY GOOD. The thoughts of cooling using underground water reservoirs is one of the CHEAPEST CLEANEST methods of cooling the whole house around. If you spend the $$ on an energy efficient house now, while it is cheap, you will be much happier in the long run.
it's not fair! my servers don't put out enough heat! they are mac G3s and the only fan in any server is just the case circulating fan! they don't even have CPU fans! :( maybe i should get one of those space heater/proccessor Pentuim 4s and run those in the winter :) (but stick with the G3s in the sumer)
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Hum, i'm a poor boy and have only 1 room for me and all my computers, so i'm running 4 computers in my room, i don't care about the noise, but sometimes when i haven't openend a window for a day or so you can smell the computers (electrostatic smell i think :) it doesn't smell that nice, sou i wouldn't heat the other rooms with the hot air from your server room!
Life sucks.
There are more of us out there than people think.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I just bought a new house too (will be finished in may 2002), and my solution is quite simple: I will use a small room (8 m2) for office and make it air conditioned. Since I use Linux, I use the same 2xCPU computer as workstation, webserver, Tribes 2 server, cvs server, sftp server, Interbase server etc. Unless your internet connection to your home is extremely large, you will never need more than one server, and that server can also be your desktop.
who cares
Install proper (typically ceiling mounted) server-room air conditioner. Remember to route the condensation water to floor sink reliably.
Connect the room to central ventilation system.
Install UPS and systems that automatically power down systems in case of overtemperature (==air conditioner breakdown).
Install some sort of automatic anti-fire system.
I have too much experience of poorly designed heat transfer implementations in small to mid-sized server rooms "planned" by non-HPAC people. (And this is in arctic climate zone, so "just some ventilation" is certainly out of question in places like California!)
Get a professional to design it, unless you want to find $100k worth of computing equipment fried one morning, or the whole house burned to the stone base.
"Do something man. Right now."
Just as a data point, I have recently consolidated all but one of my servers onto a single little box, drawing a little bit under 100 watts. My UPS can keep this little guy up for two hours during a power outage.
Another point to consider for home server rooms which are not in a basement, is to run all cables up the wall closest to the center of the house - this gives you maximum room when crawling around the ceiling.
So when you are running new cables, or tracing faults or whatever, you aren't cramped down by the pitch of the roof.
I've done this, and while it is *never* fun stuffing around with cables in a roof space, at least if its in the center of the house you can stand up and stretch.
regards,
Duncan
I'll think of a funny sig later on
Usually a "cold air return" is near the floor, as it's intended to remove cold air in the winter. In your server room, have that air return vent connected to openings near the floor and ceiling. Install the type of grill which can be opened and closed, so you can adjust how much air gets pulled from the top and bottom of the room. This lets you keep air circulating, but you now can remove hot air more easily.
Make sure you also run a vent from the furnace to that room, and again have an adjustable grill so you can control how much air enters the room. In the winter you probably want to nearly close it, and allow more of the house air to be drawn through the warm room.
The last thing you need is a Fan Always On switch. Sometimes there is one on the furnace, and sometimes there is one in the thermostat. Leave the fan always on, so you keep air moving and even out the differences.
Last, consider an electronic air filter. This is an electrostatic device installed next to the furnace, in the cold air return. It's a couple of hundred dollars, but it removes well over 90% of stuff floating in the air. If your fan is always running, you also keep running the air through so it is kept nice and clean. You just have to wash the metal filters, no disposable filters to buy. Less dust in the computers.
I've got 2 loaded racks downstairs. (Click here to see most of them) and my power bill is about $200/mo. I'm in Sacramento, so we're not getting screwed over by PG&E. I'm still getting screwed over, but it hurts a whole lot less than the PG&E type of screwing. :D
I've also stopped using major appliances and have started using the laundromat again, but hey, at least I have a ton of blinky lites downstairs.
Quiet SCSI disks: Fujitsu MAJ-series drives. 10k rpm. Reasonably priced, too.
WD Enterprise drives: Again, quiet, and especially cheap, since WD stopped making SCSI drives last summer. TigerDirect's been known to sell new 18GB U160 drives for $99.
The Maxtor Atlas III isn't too bad, either. Very good price/performance.
Most of what I have is, sadly, Seagate Cheetahs and late-model Barracudas. Both models of drives that take soul-killing noise to new levels.
For very-nearly as good operation out of IDE drive, the Maxtor 740X and WD1x00xB drives are great. Very quiet, speedy, and with enormous capacity (80 and 100/120 GB, respectively).
Seagate ATA Barracuda IVs literally don't make noise, but performance is tepid at best - a WD 600AB (5400rpm) performs nearly as well, is just as quiet, and is cheaper.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
If you're on a limited budget (as most people are when putting together home data centers) I highly recommend the STEN shelving units from Ikea. These are designed for workshop shelves, but they make excellent low-end computer racks. They're available in full and half sizes, and you can expand your rack horizontally by bolting them together (which is accomplished very easily using the included hardware). They're just the right size and shape for computer equipment, and since they're made of wood, you can easily screw things into the posts - such as power strips, small hubs, etc.
I've got a setup like this in my basement and it's very nice -- attractive and functional.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Oh, she's a mail order bride!! That explains it.
If you are really serious about creating the perfect server room environment, you want a dedicated cooling unit for this room only. While there are many manufacturers, the Liebert Corporation is typically considered the best for this purpose. Their website,p id =4&cycles=60HZ , has numerous unit types.
http://www.liebert.com/dynamic/catprodlist.asp?
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
Put in some raised flooring, about $20 sq/ft, have some of them drilled out for downdraft venting. Get a used challenger 3000 from a failed dot com, yup Canada has its fair share. Set it up for downdraft cooling and Voila!
I live in Zone 4 (cold winters and hot summers). I have a Sun STORedge rack with four SPARC CPUs and two i386 CPUs. The two i386s put out more heat than the four SPARCs.
During extremely hot (80F+) days, central air conditioning takes care of the system. During cool (less than 45F) days, outside air could do the job. That limits the problem to cooling during the not-hot-enough-for-a/c-days and too-warm-for-outside-air days.
I installed the rack into a 5ft. x 5ft. closet that vents through a 4" duct into a room in the attic and draws cool (not cold) air from a 1,500 sq.ft. crawlspace through an 8" duct. During the extremely hot days, the closet uses supplementary central air conditioning and switches off the draw-fan. If the outside temperature drops below 45F, an automatic damper switches the crawlspace air to direct-draw outside air (wall-mounted fan, 4" opening). The closet has foam insulation in the walls (not just for temperature but also for sound) and a tightly closing door. This setup keeps the interior between about 50F and 60F year-round with very little operating cost.
I thought about recirculating warm air back into the home heating system, but the BTU value just seemed too minuscule. Right now, I have it set up to warm up a 10ft. x 10ft. book storage room in my attic, but it does not do much for it, so I may remove that and just vent the thing to the outside directly.
Advantages
Moderate setup cost: $250 (materials) +50 (professional installation) for a low-noise high-power exhaust fan , $100+400 for a push-fan for cool air from the crawlspace, $200 for really good thermostats, $150+200 for the automatic damper, $50 for two remote sensor thermometers, $400 for foam insulation, $10+150 to add a central a/c outlet.
Little operating cost: exhaust fan runs on 150W and push-fan on 50W.
Low noise.
Drawbacks
Recovery: Unfortunately, I need to keep open the door to perform maintenance, and the closet heats instantly and takes several hours to return to its desired operating temperature.
Humidity: I have not experienced any significant problems, but the crawlspace air has very high humidity. I hope this does not adversely affect the system, but I do not really know for sure.
Dust/Dirt: I wish I had a basement built over concrete, not a crawlspace over dirt. I have to use extensive filtering, which not only reduces air flow, but also adds much cleaning time.
Uninvited Guests: On one cool summer day two years ago, the automatic damper switched on and drew thousands of tiny flies into the closet -- what a mess to clean! I have now installed double screens on both sides of the vent. I have also had a medium-sized unidentified rodent make its way up from the crawlspace.
Note: the larger the room, the more cool air it needs. The above setup works extremely well for my 8ft. x 5ft. closet and my 1,500 sq.ft. crawlspace supplies more then enough cool air in the summer.
Tip: search home improvement web sites for ideas. I could not have done this without a professional heating engineer.
Three words,
Walk-in freezer
You can have electric pugs installed inside, Why not cat5 or other computer type cables
Also, we figure this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night
Just keep the server room door open.
I use Leviton 24"x14" metal wallmount panels for the wiring headend and brought all the telco and ethernet (both on Cat5e, natch.) into one, and the COAX for terrestrial and satellite TV into the other. That cleans up the wiring a lot.
Now to the relevance of this to the need for a server room: once you've got most of the wiring squirled away, what's left that you need fancy racks, with multiple servers that will be serious heat daemons? Are you really going to stuff a beowolf in there?
My guess is that you'll have one server for incoming email, and if you use an appropriate router/firewall, you can have it on the inside of your firewall, serving double duty for NIS, NTP, news caching, DNS caching, and all those other services that you want to distribute and perhaps connect to externally (i.e. NTP).
You can use the same or another server for local data/media storage for distribution through the house. Add a UPS and your done. This is what I plan. My only mistake was not wiring an home run to the headend in the same room as the headend.
The only way I can see you needing more servers there is if you want to set up a compute farm. I'd be half-tempted to either (a) consider a different location for a server-farm co-located with the headend, or (b) use another room/closet.
You could've hired me.
Electricity in Ontario will no longer be cheap in 2002. The government has decided to privatize Ontario Hydro. Obviously not taking the lesson from California and Alberta.
Prepare for brownouts. Prepare for rates to soar. Not sure what you can do, but I'd do my best to use as little AC as possible in this new server room.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
Since you are building you should consider a "hot water heat" system. Basically this involves laying a special plastic pipe in the concrete and using a low pressure boiler to curculate warm water through the concrete.
It's scaleable from small to industrial and has many advantages over conventional hot air systems.
Water is more efficent than air for heating/cooling.
Concrete acts as a thermal mass and temps are very stable, even if power is lost.
This system heats the objects in a room rather than heating the air and relying on that warm air to heat objects in the room. Typically users set heat settings to the mid 60's because cooler air is refreshing yet everything is warm to the touch.
Possible to nearly eliminate dust/mould/etc problems with moving air systems.
A little more that hot air, but affordably so.
I know people who use it for summer cooling and winter heat in:
Standalone 2 car garage;
Farm shop of about 1200 sq feet
Entire homes, one I know of has an indoor pool and is over 6000 sq ft.
I have worked in the garage at -40 and it was super comfortable. Every tool is warm to the touch, and there are no flames (electric; any fuel possible including redundant), hot or cold spots, etc.
You will like living in a house like this. There are systems that can be installed in upper floors, although it may not be necessary if you avoid carpet.
If I was moving into a brand new house, and was looking to build a server farm properly, I'd be ready - this is one of my favourite "What would you do if you won the Lottery?" answers, and I've spent a lot of time planning it.
After looking at the server farm in work I figured the first thing to decide is "What the heck is all that stuff going to sound like in my house? It's pretty noisy at work, and the walls are made of breeze block and concrete. I can hear a motor hum through the wall when there's no other noise. In my house, after about 10:30pm there's no noise at all, it's silent. If I leave my desktop PC on overnight you can hear it.
I'd certainly soundproof the walls, and if money was no object, I'd add insulation to keep the heat out. I'd then look at some kind of system to pull dust and fibles out of the air before they reached the equipment. We have an extraction system with filters that are regularly cleaned. Houses get pretty dusty, with the resultant build up all adding to the build up of heat.
I reckon you'd want to sort all that before you started with the actual ecuipment.
Now wash your hands.
Depends on where the room is w/regard to the rest of the house. What'd I recommend would be:
1) Localized thermometers linked into a Linux box... Therm A = Room, Therm B= House, Therm C = Outside
2) Localized fans and venting also controled by the Linux Box... FV A = Room to outside, FV B = Outside to Room, FV C = Room to House Ductwork, FV D = House Ductwork to Room
3) Whip up some PERL code to control the fans and vents depending upon the state of Therms[x].
When it's warm outside, and you have the AC on, vent open up FV A and exhaust the room outside for a while. Then close FV A and activate FV D for a bit to suck some cool air in...
When it's cold outside, and you have the heat on, then depending upon how warm it is in the house (whether or not you want the extra heat...), open FV B to allow cool air in, and exhaust the room's heat via FV C until things cool off...
Remember that heat rises, and cool air falls... Plan your venting accordingly.
Also, if you're going to have sealed cabinets, then consider attaching the ductwork directly to/from the cabinets...
Check out the Mr. House project, and some simple Serial over Ethernet controllers to handle what you need... Or fool with some of that X10 stuff (just make sure you have a filter on your line so *ahem* your neighbors don't accidently end up controlling your fans...)...
Some nice quiet bathroom fans and dryer hose should work nicely... Either pick some up from your local home center (Home Depot! here in the states) or chat w/a general contractor - they might have some to donate after a remodeling job...
Keep thermodynamics in mind when planning. The hottest air in the room is at the top of the room, if you can add an exhaust fan in either the celing or an outer wall you can cut out ALOT of heat build up. From there if you want to block off any vents coming into the room that are connected to your household heating/cooling system you will need to make a different intake for proper airflow(as low as possible to suck in the coolest air). It seems to be the cheaper way to go, as exhaust fans arent that expensive to get. Just be sure to keep them on a different circut from your computers as to keep your power as clean as possible. P.S. Isolated grounding is your friend, replace any outlet and rerun any wire you want a server plugged into with an IG outlet. Cant be too safe :-)
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
For a family network, I could see needing a router, maybe a file server, and maybe a game server or two, but with the exception of the game servers, none of these have to be all that fast? What sort of network are you needing, that's you'll need an actual server room and face serious cooling issues?
I'm the stranger...posting to
I guess, if I did feel some perverse need for a server room, this is how I'd do it:
Buy a used Lego Mindstorms set.
Build a temerature sensor for the set. (Basically, just buy a thermistor from radioshack and hook it to a Lego sensor wire - it works like a light sensor.
Build a lego robot that can open the window a crack when the temp. sensor detects a temp above a certain limit. Voila. Plus, this way you get the geek-out factor.
I'm the stranger...posting to
My potential server room will be (If my mother agrees, of course)
Welcome to Slashdot.
Sigh.
--saint
Hello,
I have a small "server room" in my house, which includes 2 servers, 1 router and the cable modem.
The heat isn't really much of an issue..just get a few good fans in the servers and you're set. I have 2 fans in each of mine. The room isn't that hot at all.
All the wiring then goes out the ceiling, through the attic and then I dropped down 3 jacks to each room to plug up to the network.
This happened to a mate of mine with just 4 computers... The fuzz [police] came-a-snoopin, cos they thought he had a freakin weed farm in his loft!
Ali
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
Not sure what the need for multiple boxes is, but I collapsed my home lab down to a single box. Less wires, electricity, heat, etc. If you need lots of servers, get VMWare GSX server. Even with the cost of VMWare and a good dual (or more) processor box - you should still come out much cheaper and cooler than buying a rack and special rack mounted equipment and network hubs, etc.
Seriously, put something like a power supply fan at one corner of the rooms doorway. Experiment which is better, blowing in or out.
This little bit of active ventalation was learned from a friend who had a wood-stove. Just moving the air around a little bit was enough to establish currents that kept the entire house warm without a central blower, from one stove. And it wasn't a small house or one designed for wood heat.
You could put it in the door, to come on only when the door is shut, or however you want to do it.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I created a server room in the basement of my girlfriends house. It's about 10x15 feet, with 2 doors and a window. I built a bench along one of the long walls, out of 2x4's and 1/2 inch particle board, with formica on top. It's screwed into the concrete walls with special screws found at Menards. I added 2 new electrical circuts, each with it's own 20 amp breaker and 12 gauge wire, to power the server room. I also added a whole house surge protector to the breaker panel. Ended up upgrading the 100 amp service to 200 amps very soon after all of this. I have a seperate shelf for my DSL router, and switches, with a 24 port patch panel hanging under it. I used 1/2 inch electrical cable staples nailed to the wall, with 1/2 inch wide velcro cable ties as my wiring managment solution. Everything thats attached to the walls, is held up by those cement screws. All the walls are either cement or old red brick. The celing is drywall with some sort of ceiling tiles glued to it. I also have a set of those metal garage type shelves for extra space. A KVM switch to cut down on cable swaping and extra heat. I added under cabinet type floresent lights under the work bench, so when I do have to swap cables around, at least I can see. This house was built in 1920, so it already had ductwork, with heat and AC. This room has one supply vent and no return vent. In the winter, I just crack the window open a little, and it stays nice and cold. (60.4 degrees F right now). I have a little digital thermometer on the wall ~$8 at Menards. This last summer, I bought a $120 window AC at Menards,(I love Menards!) and used it to cool the room. It worked great, kept it on medium speed all summer. The window is located at the top of the room, which makes a window AC work great since the cold air can fall to the bottom. This fall, I also added a ceiling fan, $20 at Menards, to help move hot stale air around. I hope to disassemble the window AC unit, and convert it into a ducted system for just this room, with automatic digital thermostat, and fresh air intake. That way, when it's cool enough outside, instead of opening the window, it can kick on just the fan, and draw cold air from outside with out my intervention.
I run a web/mail/dns server for a friend of mine who runs an e-zine. I also run an Ultima Online game server, a couple of old boxes doing nothing but distributed net, plus a back up web/mail/dns server, and a file/backup server. That's all in addition to my main workstation, and other boxes that I am working on for various friends.
Oh yeah, I also have a simple 10 gallon aquarium, as a distraction.
I think that Mike Harris hates the world and wants to screw everyone over as much as possible in retaliation. Or maybe he's just an idiot. I dunno.
I have a very small room with 5 servers in a rack.
The servers are in alu-towers with system coolers, hard drive coolers and a front cooler. They are easy removable by just moving them forward. The cables are long enough to move the servers forwards.
There are 2 fans behind the servers that take the airflow away from behind the rack. I also mounted a fan that takes all the air from the ceiling out to a shaft and takes fresh air to the ground.
This helps for about 10 degrees celsius.
Aluminium cases help a lot, taking the airflow from behind the cases helps and conditioning the room by having a constant airflow also helps -a lot-.
To cool down the sysadmin you just use a tablefan or put one on the wall, and you are off running.
To get rid of the cables I have used tubes for every server. This way it's easy to change or to do maintenance on the server. The fans need to be cleaned regularly or they get stuck very fast.
Actually the best way is to put a airco in the room, though since I do not have the room to put one...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
At the college I addended, the Computing Center was actually a Depression-era stone church. The architects had built a new building inside the church, and the machine room provided the heat for the building! I'm not suggesting that a home server room will heat the entire house (unless you're installing an S/390), but an HVAC contractor may be able to come up with a way to use the server heat productively.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
My server room shares space with my workshop so that I have all of my toys in one place (in reality, my wife tole me to keep my, er, "stuff" all in one place).
Anyway, everything is in a 7' rack salvaged from a PDP 11/34 setup (that gives it some history). The rack has a 9" fan at the top which I don't run otherwise I couldn't sleep.
In the rack I have UPSes at the bottom and a monitor at the top. Below the monitor is a RAID enclosure, then a DLT drive on a shelf then a surplus Compaq ProLiant server.
Mounted in the back of the rack (facing out the rear) is a 24 port 10/100 switch, a firewall and the cable modem. This connects by 15' patch cables to the punchdown block on the walll. Almost all rooms in the in the house are wired.
On the shelves near the rack is my "technical library" and spare parts warehouse.
The rack has no side panels so I draped some carpet padding on the sides to cut down on the noise -- the loudest being the 4 fans in the drive array box.
One issue. I admit up-front that I missed the exact location within Canada of this project... If you're anywhere within a few miles of a major waterway, this may be a problem. I live in south Louisiana, USA, and we can't dig more than a couple meters down without hitting the water table. And it floods during hurricane season. Burying your servers on the coast of B.C. or Nova Scotia or alongside one of the Great Lakes could be disastrous at the wrong time of year.
-j
Several weeks ago I connected my two computers at home by peer to peer. My children wanted to use internet when I study and work at home by using internet same time. So I thought the peer to peer LAN system will be a simple way to solve this issue with my children. Now my children and I enjoy using internet from two computers same time with only one connection to the ISP through a modem.