Slashdot Mirror
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)"
You could try to invite some cool chicks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
(without opening a window)
What's wrong with opening a window? I know, I know, everybody here loves Linux, but aren't you getting carried away here?
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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 am dead serious when I tell you know I know two people who run a very successful consulting firm around my ara who have their servers in a bathroom inside their house. When I asked them why they put them there, the answer was "We don't use this bathroom, it's in the middle of the house, and it's the most secure since it has no windows in it."
:)
Ask serious questions, get slightly stupid answers
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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
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...)
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.
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!
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.
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.