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."

Comments

Cooling Theory

[PhysicsGenius]

You shouldn't need to use too much cooling. Yes, the CPU produces heat but keep in mind that a server room is a closed environment--no energy (e.g. thermal energy) is actually created. The heat produced is given off by the entropy reversal of information being created. When that information is destroyed, in practical terms just deleting a file, some of that heat is sucked back up and it cools the room back down.

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.

Remember to install a phone

[geirt]

The one thing I am missing in our server room is a plain phone....

Already on Track

[antis0c]

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.

Fond memories

[highcaffeine]

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.

Re:Cooling, Power, Cooling, Power

[sigwinch]

A good electrician will be able to hook up a meter to a few sample servers and get the exact amount of juice they pull. Use the GREATER of that number and the name plate rating on the computer.

Ignore nameplate ratings on big devices like computers and monitors. They're usually overrated. Ignore measurements. Speaking as an electrical engineer who designs computer peripherals, getting true worst-case measurements is very, very difficult. You have to exercise the hard drive heads, CPU cores, RAM busses, and I/O busses fully, and that's near impossible. Switching power supplies also draw more current as the voltage goes down. If you make the measurement when the line voltage is 130V, the equipment will draw 20% more current at 110V.

For little things like KVMs, modems, inkjet printers, etc. you can safely use the nameplate ratings.

For big things, determine how many machines you would ever conceivably want in the room. Choose the biggest, baddest equipment you could possibly want. 1U dual-proccesor machines, arrays of 15000 rpm hard drives, a desk full of 21 inch monitors, you name it. Then go to the manufacturers web sites and find the nameplate ratings for the various things, and add 'em all up. The total will be a number you won't easily outgrow.

Be sure to account for start-up loads. You don't want to trip a breaker by turning everything on at once. Hard drives draw a lot of power while they're spinning up, monitors while degaussing, laser printers while warming up the fusion rollers. This is just an educated guess, but use a factor of 2 for hard drives, and 5 for monitors. Read the specs for the laser printers very, very carefully and find the worst-case.

Also most wiring in commercial spaces is done in conduit and more than 3 wires in a conduit requires that the wires be derated and not all electricians pay attention to that (again per the NEC).

I'd go even farther. When many surge protectors divert a surge, they divert it into the ground wire. This causes a brief, high voltage spike on that circuit's ground relative to the other circuits in the room. The longer the ground wire is, the larger the spike. This spike can do nasty things to serial lines, KVM cables, and so forth that connect machines on different circuits.

So if the building breaker box is farther than, say, 50 feet from the server room, I'd have a small breaker box installed in the server room. Also this lets you recover from a tripper breaker without getting the main breaker box unlocked.

If you can afford it, have a couple of separate circuits run from the main breaker box. This gives you someplace to plug in coffee pots and vacuum cleaners without disturbing the electronics.

If the room gets its own air conditioner, make sure that has a dedicated circuit from the main breaker box.

If you can afford it, have a big industrial surge protector installed at this breaker box. Also the breaker box is a good grounding point for surge protectors on your external data lines.

The net effect is that you should plan on the electrician using #10 THHN in any conduits.

This is excellent advice. The electrical code is based on safe operation of motors and heaters. Bigger wires make your electronics more reliable by reducing voltage droop.

Also, computers often don't draw sine wave current. They draw less current at the beginning and end of the AC cycle, and more in the middle. This means the peak current is larger than the sinewave loads envisioned by the electrical codes.

Computers often need good grounding systems, so I would also require a separate ground wire to be run in the conduits even though it is usually not done since the conduit can act as a ground.

More excellent advice. Conduit is completely unacceptable for grounding computers. A grounding wire is cheaper than the cost of a single computer crash caused by a poor ground.

You will also want to make sure the racks are grounded and you may even wish to consider putting a wire mesh beneath the floor and grounding that.

Have an electrician tie all the racks and other metal stuff together with big ground wires. This will help protect the rest of your equipment if one of the devices has a ground fault. It'll also help reduce static electricity by giving you lots of big grounded metal things to touch. Wire is cheap compared to the cost of a single failure.

Finally, if possible, require that the communications cables be run in over sized conduit as well. It makes expansion much easier in the future and also provides a measure of RF shielding.

Conduit does make running wires much easier. If there is no other wiring or fluorescent lights within a few feet, I'd use nonmetallic conduit, as metallic conduit can actually act as an antenna for picking up radio waves and coupling them into your data cables. OTOH if there are AC lines parallel to the run, metallic conduit is probably better, and be sure to make the electrician ground the conduit properly.

Accessibility

[Webmoth]

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.