Slashdot Mirror
Planning a Small Server Room
An anonymous reader writes: "Our company is planning to build a small server room. Initial requirements are for two or three enclosed server cabinets in which various servers and network gear will be installed. The cabinets are planned to hold between 15 to 20 servers of various types and sizes, switches, routers, four dial-in modems for after hours use by staff who do not have ISPs and a KVM switch. We would expect for a small desk as a work area, a book case, storage for some spare parts as well as server documentation and records. We know that we need some power protection in the way of a UPS and a generator. We also expect that this room will get quite warm in the summer months so it will need more air conditioning than the rest of the office. What should we expect for power and cooling needs? Are there any 'rules of thumb' when it comes to building a server room. Good suggestions and help would be appreciated."
We've had this kind of question once, but it was for a home server room, this shouldn't be too different!
Link
Life sucks.
I'm assuming you are building this small room in a rented-office type situation, probably in a building that normally houses more people than computers.
I've been where you are, and let me say that your #1 problem will probably be cooling. If it's really a closet/old office/whatever, it is unlikely your building management will be able to get enough cooling to you. I'd recommend planning for one of those free-standing moving cooling units that can vent into the drop ceiling. By planning, I mean both power and space.
Power: Again, better get in touch with your bldg management. Most office circuits are in the range of 20 amps, which sounds like a lot, but isn't -- you shouldn't plan on using all 20 amps, and remember that if you coldstart everything at once, they will pull a lot more than 20. I would plan on an amp per server at least, and go no more than 16 boxes per circuit. You may need a 220 circuit for a movable AC or some other weird piece of equipment.
Do NOT do the latter yourself. Hire a professional electrician. One mistake in this area can not only ruin your business, but potentially take your life.
If you are in an old building, make sure that the floors can safely support the weight of alot of computers.
When you initally layout the room, pack everything as tightly as possible. You'll be happy you made that decision 5 years from now.
Be careful with roof-mounted air conditioners. They have a habit of spewing ice cold water all over the place when they have a problem.
Offset the racks far enough away from the wall so that you have enough room to work. Make sure that some dope doesn't push them back on you.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Of course, if you intend to send large amount of data out over the internet the environment is no longer entropically closed and you will experience heat buildup. In fact, Josh Bell proved in 1999 that data transmitted over a CAT5 cable is mathematically isomorphic to heat transferred backward over that same cable.
Since you are probably intending to have a net link, make sure you insulate your T1 connection well to keep this heat gain to a mimimum.
The one thing I am missing in our server room is a plain phone....
RFC1925
You've already listed some good rules of thumb, the Air Conditioning, shelving space, etc. I can't express how important it is to have good organization. Organize your unused cables too, otherwise one day you'll end up with a 200 pound rat's nest of cables you're trying to pick through to find a spare UPS Serial cable, and it'll take you half the day to un-knot it. Keep your servers and network equipment well labeled too, this way you don't have to describe to a new employee which server to power cycle on the phone.
Locks, you'll want to have good locks on this room. Maybe a camera in it too, Security is always important. Not only security, but preventing some uneducated employee from accidently wondering into the room and pressing buttons. It happens I've seen it. I've also seen employees wonder in and realize their monitor isn't as good as the one you have in the server room, and switch them.
Keep it clean - I can't stress this enough either. Server rooms are a breeding ground for dust. Keep it well filtered with air filters, de-humidifiers to keep the moister down, and try to limit what kind of cardboard products are in the room.
I'm not a good expert on Power and Cooling, but I think one rule of thumb is as much as you can get it. And Redundancy, cooling included. Multiple Air Conditioners, and Multiple power backups. I've been in many places where Air Conditioners go out in server rooms and those things jump to 100 degees in just a few hours.
That's about all the advice I can offer, good luck.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Most of the climate control units -- and you really need to think in terms of humidity as well as temperature -- are very noisy. Don't put someone at the desk on any kind of extended basis (>1 day) or he or she is likely to go postal. Noise cancelling headphones may help, but these sorts of rooms are not in general fit for extended human habitation.
A regular telephone with a speakerphone and a l-o-o-ng cord and possibly a headset is also a good idea for calls to various tech support lines.
--Paul
The rule-of-thumb I know is that a refrigerator can extract no more heat than three times its own power rating. Add up the average power at peak usage of all your equipment: (4KW?/rack * 3 racks) and divide by three, then you need a 4KW? refrigeration unit for ordinary circumstances.
You definitely want the room to have its own power feed and air conditioning unit. 30 IBM servers going full-tilt, relying on your building's circuits and air conditioning isn't the wisest of choices. =)
You should set this up with a removeable tile subfloor so that you can run cables between racks in a pretty fashion. Power is gonna be a big concern. Get cable trays - separate ones for power and data - and mount them under the subfloor. Get yourself plenty of wire ties, too.
Most of the stuff you'll want can be gotten cheaply at Anixter.
For non rack mounted equipment, wire shelving works very well. It holds up well, and allows for ventilation and water flow (from fire sprinklers). You can then tie wrap the cables to the shelving.
And either black anodized or chrome plated depending on decor.
It won't just get hot in the summer, it's going to be hot 24/7. All of your equipment has a rating for the amount of heat produced..from small things like disks and tape drives to big server enclosures. Look that information up and figure out how many BTUs of heat you'll be outputting. Then go find an AC unit that can handle it for your sized environment.
Power, Power, Power. Going to go with a big UPS or smaller ones for each rack? Talk to an electrician about circuits. Figure up how many amps of power you need and then decide on the number of circuits. They didn't do that in the room I took over and we've blown circuits three times, but it's been fixed on my watch.
I recommend a locking door, of course. Raised floors if you can do it. And always figure on another rack or two. They seem to multiply and working in a cramped server room switching equipment gets old.
NOTE: If anyone needs server racks in the RTP, NC area let me know. I have three that would be free to a good home. Glass front nice cases.
Nobody has mentioned anything about Fire Supression except one guy who said sprinklers. Hehe NOPE. Consider getting a Halon dump system or some other chemical fire supression system that will not damage your equipment.
I have seen when a diskpack caught fire from a crashed disk. When they opened the door to the disk pack a sudden backdraft type explosion occured. The Halon released just seconds later putting out the fire, all while the other servers, printers, and mainframe continued to work. Sprinklers would of been a $20 million dollar mistake.
Fatz
http://www.freebsd.org
Brings back memories of a previous job I held. Our server room (about 40x65 feet) was a glass-enclosed room with a raised floor for cabling and ventilation. The AC unit was the size of four industrial refridgerators side by side. The UPS was a cabinet slightly larger than the AC unit and held dozens of batteries in series which could keep the equipment in the room running for 30 minutes -- more than enough time for the outside generator to kick in. Each battery was roughly what you would find in a large truck.
The room housed the servers for our local network and for the WAN which consisted of roughly two dozen buildings scattered around the county. We had a mix of HP/UX, Linux and NT servers -- and even one MPE/iX box (an HP3000 server). We also had our dial in, frame relay, outside Internet connection and terminal servers in the room. I believe there were 6 rackmount cabinets for most of the servers and the network equipment (the HP3000 and our voicemail systems were their own fridge-sized units outside the cabinets).
It was actually separated in to two parts, as well. The main room, which housed the actual servers, was about 40x50 feet. The second part was separated by a glass wall and was 40x15 feet. The smaller area had desks and a couple enclosed rooms where the support staff would usually work. Hardware work was done inside the main server room because of the air control.
The main things done right with the room were:
- AC Unit: this thing kept the room at a nice 54 degrees Fahrenheit no matter what was going on outside. The AC in the rest of the building would go out and everyone would start opening windows and turning on their desk fans, while I would retreat to the server room and put on my fleece.
- The raised floor: We never had a single cable on the floor to trip someone, and we could put a power outlet anywhere in the room we wanted. The floor was about a foot and a half off the real floor and covered the entire room. I loved that raised floor.
- Security: Sure, someone could break the glass walls (although the building's security system included glass break detectors in the server room), but the doors were very heavy and very thick. Access was controlled by individual keycodes which we had to change regularly. Out of the 50 plus people working in the same area of the building the server room was located, three of us had passcodes to the server room. So we always knew when someone was in there because one of us would have to escort them in and out of the room.
- Shelving: We had tons of shelving. We devoted one side of the room to just aisles of shelves, all clearly marked with their contents. The actual types of items were kept in alphabetized order. So, we had our boxes of cables near the first aisle, memory was near the middle and "Wyse" terminals near the end (a brand of basic vt102 dumb serial terminals).
- Deskspace: My desk actually was located in our server room, though I was usually on call in another building. But we also had an "island" in the middle of the room for general use. It was large enough to have four people simultaneously working on hardware with all their components spread out around them. We also had a couple workstations on the island that could be used to log in to the various servers and other equipment. These were convenient because they could remain logged in with privileged access to certain servers and we didn't have to worry about someone using them when we went to chat with mother nature since access to the room was stricly controlled.
The only complaint I ever had about the room was that when we would get shipments of 100 new workstations, they would cramp the room up a little until we got them all set up and shipped out to the various other buildings.
The suggestions I would make for things to consider when setting up a new server room:
- AC (obviously) and UPS (obviously)
- Raised floor (you can get by without one, but when you have one you never want to get rid of it)
- Entranceway security and if possible video monitoring
- Strict, enforceable access policy (there's no need for the the new graphics temp to be wandering around in the server room, but sometimes you'll want to be able to escort the VP through the room so he/she can see all the pretty blinking lights)
- 1.5 times the rackspace for your initial machine count at minimum, with twice the space initially needed reserved for cabinets
- Tons and tons of shelving, plastic ties, rubber bands, electrical tape and sticky labels. You never have enough of any of these things. Get plenty of bins of various sizes, too, to use on the shelves for things like screws, jumpers, adapters, etc.
- It's really helpful to have a common area for all the tools. We actually didn't do this at first and we'd lose a crimper or a screwdriver or something once or twice a week (more often than not we'd find them under the raised floor).
- If you find you're running a lot of cables in the to ceiling to distribute to the rest of the building, get some regular PVC plumbing pipes and a hacksaw to create basic conduits in to the ceiling and then above the ceiling to outside the walls of the server room. One of the easiest ways to feed cables through these is to get a string and tie it in to a loop where it will run one length inside the PVC pipe and another length outside. Create a few loopholes in the string and then whenever you want to feed a cable through it, hook the cable's connector in to a loop and then pull the string.
We currently have 2 server rooms, one here in MIS, the other in another building. The second room can't be locked(!) due to pointy hair policy and sticking useless crap in there. At some point a user slipped a line printer in there to cut down on noise in their office and the room has been left unlocked ever since.
My recommendations would be:
1. NEVER EVER EVER EVER let lusers into your server room. Put decapitated heads on bamboo sticks all around your server room. I almost killed someone when I came in one morning, and realized someone had manualy ctrl+alt+del'ed our timeclock server because their PC couldn't access it and they assumed it was a server problem.
2. Replace the door handle on the door with a deadbolt. Nothing says go away more than no handle, and its fairly easy to just turn the key and push.
3. Use racks. If your room is already going to be temp controled, and its locked up tight, cabinets aren't needed. Plus if venting fans on one of your cabniets dies, it turns it into a big thick metal blanket for your servers.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
1. Plenty of airconditioning 2 smaller units capable of 2/3's of the load each giving you 1 1/3 total needed capacity.
2. Fans for when 1 of the A/C units die. The cheap ones do a good job.
(there are 3 things)
3. Sound dampening material on the walls and ceiling near the server's or it will be loud in the room.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
Cable management cable management cable management!!!
well really more than just those, those are just my big pet peeves.
Good things to have include
a work bench
a tool cart
a phone
a seperate test subnet (firewalled from the real net)
a good lock
cooling
UPS
generator
all internal walls
static floor panals
and make sure there is room to work today and a few years down the line...
-Booyah
#include sig.h
Get some drains mounted under it. When the sprinklers on the floor above go off (they will), or the roof leaks, it'll go under the floor, and drain away. Don't put it in a basement, and if you are in an area prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, put the server room lower in the building. If the area is prone to flooding, move it up a floor or two. If in doubt, mount a moisture alarm in a low spot in the room. (They sell them wherever they sell sump pumps.)
Under the floor is really where racks are meant to have their cables run. Some flooring units have inserts that act as vents, and that works nicely. Your under-floor is ventilated, kept dry, and your smoke sensors have a higher chance of sniffing the smoke if the air moves through that closed area. There are actually some commercial smoke alarms that continually pump and sniff air, rather than the passive ones we have in our homes that rely upon convection and diffusion for the smoke to reach a sensor. Put some sort of dust-handling equipment on your air-conditioning. The folks that sell you the AC will be able to help. See if they can tie the ventilation into the smoke alarm so that if there is an alarm, fresh oxygen stops getting pumped to that room. (They do this on some modern highrises.) The folks that sell you the AC should also be able to help you with sizing the air conditioning to your requirements.
Call in your local pest control expert to mouse-proof the building, then make sure there's serious screening over all entries into the building. Mice get bored, and for fun, they pick their teeth with the fiber core of the cable running to your most mission-critical server. However, they have to chew through several cables before they find the right one.
Consider one of those big panic buttons that shut the room down in a hurry. Just make sure under a cover so that someone doesn't accidentally punch it. At the very least, place the circuit breaker panel in the room, and clearly exposed (meaning don't stack crap in front of it), so that someone can get to it and flip things on and off.
Also place several of the correct class fire extinguishers there. Place a wall-mounted first-aid kit (some cases have sharp burrs that cut fingers well) near the door. Doesn't have to be fancy. Could just be something on a shelf. Also have a paper-towel dispenser (or just a roll of Bounty) for when someone forgets, takes their drink in, and then knocks it over.
Finally, plan for expansion. Make the room a bit bigger than you think, but leave one wall that can be bumped out to claim the room next to it sometime in the future. (However, I think server sizes have stopped growing, so the need for more physical space is lessening.)
...do not forget to consider (in no particular order):
Fire extinguisher mechanisms
Easily accessible power circuit breakers
Room accessibility that allows you to easily put another cabinet in there (or out of there !) - tall enough doors, ramps if you'll have a raised floor, etc.
Tipically systems pull cold air from the front and blow hot air from the back (check yours, though); consider this when laying out the overall air flow, as you don't want to waste expensive cold air on the wrong "side" of the systems.
Remember that the door on your cabinets will need to be opened. Depending on the cabinet models, the orientation can (or cannot) be reversed. Another point to remember when laying out the cabinets through the room...
Did I mention raised floor and structured cabling ?... Maybe I'm asking for too much....
I've deployed a lot of small data centers. Your choices in what to buy are actually easier than you think. You can calculate your power and cooling needs down to the last BTU and KVa, and then you have to buy equipment in a size they make them in! Just go the smaller end of the lines.
You'll end up with a 3 ton or 5 ton air conditioner. Liebert air conditioners can also humidify/dehumidify and heat/cool. There is a market for used Lieberts if you want to save some money. Call your local A/C contractor.
A 3Kva UPS would be a good size unless you want more standby time in which case you could go for a 5 Kva or maybe two 3's for redundancy.
Liebert makes great UPSs, too. The APC Matrix line is a pretty good design because you can hot-swap the batteries yourself.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
We run a pair of 20-amp circuits to hardwired 'plugmold' power outlet strips mounted to each rack, with the 'left' and 'right' side being fed from a distinct UPS and battery (two giant UPS systems, one giant diesel generator).
Thus every power strip has it's own circuit breaker, overloading any one will only take out half of the equipment in one rack.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Make sure everything is to CAT-5E specs!
Install a 24-port patch panel in each rack. Consider punching down at least 12 ports in each, if not all 24.
Run all of these connections back to a 'patch rack' or 'patch wall' and make all of your inter-rack and rack-to-desktop connections at this central location. Document all changes, and you are golden.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
depends heavily on what kind of servers. i built :) infact its hailing outside now.
a server room last year, and equipped it with
6 tons of cooling, 9 racks and 1 cabinet, currently
about 2+1/2 racks of available stuff, and my cooling
is fine, its using less the 4 tons now, but its still
winter
for power, I started with 6 x 20amp circuts with
6 x APC 1400RMXLNET+battery packs, have since
added 3 more 20 amp circuts and a 30amp circut.. most systems have 2 hours of battery backup, which is more then enough, these systems while critical are not critical enough to have a generator or a high end UPS. Cooling
was by far the hardest. your best off contacting multiple HVAC companies and having them evaluate your needs. I got stuff ranging from 3 tons to 15 tons. non x86 based stuff produces a lot more heat(in general) then a single proc x86 machine. About half my server room is non x86, the rest is of course x86. There is a formula
which can convert amp usage to BTUs but
from my experience(and those that I talked to)
the formula is WAY off. If i would had gone
with it, I would of ended up with less then
3 tons of cooling. Which when deploying the
server room would of been enough for about
5 racks at 70F.(my server room has a 2ton and
a 4 ton HVACs, when i started building the 4ton
wasn't installed yet, and the room got hot if
i turned on the row of racks with non x86 stuff). 3 days later the 4ton was activated.
most of the equipment when i built the server room was moved from another site(very little new hardware), so even though the cost of 8 or 9 UPSs may equal that of 1 big UPS(i don't know if it does) the UPSs were bought over a period of time. so its not like i chooe between 1 big ups and many small ones. I had the small ones already and used them.
Lots of good suggestions here, but I don't see any mention of accessibility (yet).
Make sure that you can walk -- and stand up -- BEHIND your servers. Make sure you can open cabinet doors fully. Make sure you can pull a server out of the rack without moving stuff around. Be able to have two people in the room: one in front and one behind the rack at the same time. Make sure you don't have to move the rack to work on it.
You want a server ROOM, not a server CLOSET. I've seen far too many situations where work on a server involved crawling under desks, moving stuff, craning necks. Hey, moving computer while they are running is A BAD THING: you don't want heads crashing into a hard disk platter. Besides, you risk knocking the (power) cords loose, something I've done on several occasions. I've got one customer whose server closet is so small I have to move the rack forward to access the back and then push it back to access the front again.
I would say that you want at least 3 feet in front of and behind the rack. Typical racks are nearly 3 feet deep, so you want your server room to be at least 9 feet in one of the dimensions.
Now placing your rack in the middle of the room means you have to get your cabling and power to the middle of the room. Having your patch panel or power outlets on the wall just won't cut it. Use either overhead cable trays (NOT conduit) or a subfloor with removable tiles. Don't run cables above a drop ceiling from point to point in the server room (cables headed out of the room are OK to be in the ceiling). NEVER run cables across the floor.
Bolt your rack to the floor so you (or an earthquake) don't knock it over.
DO NOT allow non-network junk to clutter up the server room. That old dot matrix machine gun that nobody will ever use again but you can't bear to throw away can go in a storage closet somewhere else.
Again, give yourself elbow room. It may be hard to convince the person with the purse strings to pay for space ("but the server will fit in a 3' x 3' closet, why do you need a 10' x 12' room?") that will be mostly empty, but it will make your life easier and will -- practice saying this -- REDUCE UNPRODUCTIVE DOWNTIME. Make sure you get the "unproductive" in there.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
What should we expect for power and cooling needs?
/. isn't going to do your homework for you on this one.
Using my Jedi mind powers, I see that you require 240V/20A twist lock outlets, and that your machines each put out 1200 BTU/hour. Therefore, your power and cooling solution is...
Ummm... hate to break it to you, but
-
Also, as everyone said, power. keep in mind that the UPSes you'll need probably don't plug into normal outlets; pick them out, and call the electrician - Hubble twist-lock-y things are what you need, but check out APC (and other) web sites for the specs on the plug; you don't need to know what they mean, just copy them carefully for the electrician.
-
The portable air conditioners are nice, but still need drains - talk to the facilities people while you're doing the lay-out - if there are pipes in the walls in a convenient place, take advantage of them and put the A/C units by them.
-
Don't worry too much about humidity. back in the day you had to 'cause there was paper in the computer rooms from the big line printers. i doubt you have that, so make sure the A/C people realize that and don't sell you super-fancy humidity controls that you likely don't need.
-
As has been mentioned - a meter behind the racks, and 2 meters in front, computers are heavy and the more space you have the easier it will be to get them in the racks.
-
IMO, don't use it for storage, no shelves, no drawers in the desk/table, etc. It's a machine room, not a storage room. Put the computers in, and stay the hell out. It's temping, since it's locked, and probably not full, etc. But don't do it, you'll lose control really fast, and it'll be a disaster.
-
Again, power: circuits, and more circuits. However many you have, you don't have enough. One room I designed has two 30A circuits per rack, and in some cases that's not enough, mounted on the cable tray so cords don't go back to the wall behind the racks - remember, you need to be able to walk (and carry heavy things) back there.
-
Also, in addition to a phone, put normal old network jacks in the walls. I know, you'll have switches in there somewhere, but probably not near where you want the desk, and nor does the cable tray go there. If you're having cabling done anyhow, a few jacks right near the patch panel are cheap and well worth it.
-
Leave room for expansion, pack it as tight as you can. Remember, when you add hardware, you need to add A/C and maybe UPS and power. Leave lots of room. If you're over 60-70% full today, you're in trouble real soon now.
Good luck.Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
At my company, they went through a total cleanup of the server room and they installed power strips with LED ammeters built in. They are KILLER, and they give surprising readings. Nameplate (rated) power levels are very unreliable, and these strips did a great job of allowing them to quantify on a continuous basis how much power is being drawn through each breaker.
They're pricey (something like $300 apiece) but the sysadmins all thought they had paid form themselves easily in the first couple of months.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Use third party racks that allow for variable sizing of rails and better cable management than the standard 'vendor' racks:
http://www.chatsworth.com/
There is a lot of equipment that you can buy with a "call-home" feature. Most just calls the manufacture (You pay service for them to answer), but some will page you.
Even if you don't want to pay for this feature now, you will in the future (odds are you will eventially have at least one critical machine to keep up)
Something nobody seems to have mentioned is that you may need to UPS your AC. There's little point in running your servers during a power failure on a UPS, whilst the temperature in the room slowly rises & they cook in their own juices.
Here we recently designed a new server room where the UPS includes 6 tons of battery - this is enough to run all our servers & all their AC for 5 hours - which is long enough for us to organise an alternate power feed from another village (we're a bit out in the sticks here!).
Matt
These are more limited in what you can mount, though with the right shelves they can fit some pretty big PCs.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Make sure you control all access, including the potential for intrusion from above and below -- dropped ceilings and raised floors often make an easy path for a skinny crook to get from a public area to a controlled location.
For around $1K in equipment you can set up four cameras, a quad combiner, and a time-lapse VCR system to provide a video record of everybody entering and leaving the room.
We've examined many different options to handle the camera monitoring and recording with a digital system, but there is no PC solution that comes close to the good old $200 surveillance VCR. Plus, videotape is going to be more acceptable when you need to involve law enforcement.
One last note -- make sure the VCR itself is in a seperate controlled access location. Not much point in a videotape record when the thief can simply eject your tape and walk off with the evidence.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
2) A/C. To save money we decided the space didn't need a seperate airco. Oh, yes it does - all those boxes make a lot of heat.
Display some adaptability.
Some of our considerations included:
- LOTS of conduit dropping into the server room
- separate A/C
- plenty of 110 & 220 circuits
- separate electrical panel tied to a generator by-pass switch
- workbench
- plywood on all the walls (for mounting equipment, stapling, etc.)
It is by far my favorite room in the building!
WHile not strictly a case in server room design, make sure you take time to organize cables, cable runs and system placement.
:)
The system that has worked for me in our midsize machine room (3 Unix, 3 NT, 1 2K, Phone Switch, and UPSes) is a compination of color and labeling:
on each cable, put a tag attached to each end saying what that end plugs into and where the other end goes - you can also use numbers and a lookup sheet, but that was too tedious for me. Another good idea someone showed me is used specific cable colours for specific connections (i.e. Blue for Workstations to hubs/switched, Green for Servers, yellow for hubs/switch/router to hub/switch/router, etc) -- it make visualization of your setup a bit easier to contemplate.
Of you're using human-sized UPSes, UPS everything. Each machine should have it's own 20-25 minute (exluding monitor) UPS, and put maybe 1-2 (maybe three, if they're small) pices of networking equipmnt (hubs, DSL routers, etc) to a UPS.
If you have the interesting chance to also work with the electrical wiring and want the extra piece of mind, have a power receptical every 4 feet (I've found that works well in my experince in the case of unpowered racks) -- and if you want to REALLY overplan, have a serpeate curcuit breaker for every wall/group of plugs.
But trust me on the wiring
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
At my school I am a co-director of the Tech Dept.
We has a server room (that used to be a radio broadcasting room), with a nice AC unit. We have 2 compaq big servers, and 4 hubs, 3 switches, and 4 ciscos. Atleast once a week I come in in the morning to find that my partner has turned off the AC because he was cold, and the room goes to over a 100degrees. Make it a rule, or just lose the control, so that employees can't mess with the AC.
liebert makes some kickass UPS's...
so once again, let's go through the list.
AC
ups(don't forget the AC)
fire extinguisher system
phone
raised floor
structural supports(if above 1st floor)
airfilters
dehumidifiers
cable trays
making sure the power system can handle it
locked door(electrick combo locks are shiny)
shelving(lots of shelving, sturdy stuff too)
a toolbox(you'll thank me)
sound insulation(this room will be LOUD.)
circuit breakers
make sure you get an EE to double check the room
an electronic thermometer that can page you when the temp jumps above a certain amount.
an aluminium shelf to set your 6pack of favorite beverage(if it's gonna be cool, might as well sue it, right?:)
If my management caught me asking questions about how to do my job on Slashdot, I'd be shitcanned for sure... Did they in fact interview you before you got this position?!
You will want TWO analog POTS phone lines, dedicated to the room. They should bypass your company PABX or VoIP system. They should be ordered as business grade lines, so you can get better service from the telco if they have problems.
:-)
These phone lines will save your career sometime when the power is flaky, or your PABX has gone down, or you have to call two different hell desk lines at the same time (finger pointing? Who? Not me!)
Since you will have some dial-in modems, ensure one of your telephones is a simple, plain, ordinary telephone, which doesn't require electricity to operate. For the other, follow the other suggestions in this sub-thread; i.e. cordless, handsfree speakerphone, etc.
And a selection of RJ-11 (not RJ-45) cords, long enough to reach from corner to corner of your machine room. And a couple of banjo breakout connectors.
And depending on the theft/wandering kit factor in your place, florescent spraypaint to mark your easily lost phones
the AC
I'm back!
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
How about providing a URL or brand of the Power strips?
I have had a hard time finding speakerphones that will work in a server room. With almost all half-duplex phones (except for the very rare model where you can manually adjust switching sensitivity) the ambient hum of all the servers and UPSes is so loud that it triggers the switching mechanism such that you don't hear much of the person at the other end.
The only really effective experience I had was spiriting the expensive full-duplex Polycom from the conference room into the server room. It was later tracked down and I was the recipient of some profoundly dirty looks.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Upgraded the site today and realized that my article addressing changed. Click here instead.
I do agree that one hard-and-fast rule is that crossover cables should be a unique color, not used for any other cable -- I also prefer yellow, but at a previous job the color was pink (because that was one of the few colors the colorblind CIO could differentiate).
One advantage to the 'yellow is crossover' rule is that IT employees get a legal, free supply of brand new cables, as you have to dispose of all of the brand new non-crossover yellow-jacketed cables vendors tend to include with new hardware.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
You need to hire an electrical contractor licensed for that type of work. Get someone that can do a power & heat study for you. Make sure that they are licensed and have all the information about the hardware you are going to install in the server room. Your cooling will only be as good as the information you provide them.