Slashdot Mirror
What's the Proper Temperature for a Server Room?
Izzard asks: "As a network engineer, I sometimes have to spend many hours in other people's server rooms. One in particular has a good few servers, DVD jukebox, plenty of monitors and switches etc. It's a thick, stone-walled room with a big door. It would get very, very warm were it not for the two huge air conditioning units in there. Someone has decided that these units will be set to maintain a constant air temperature of 17-18 deg. C (62-64F). After an hour or so of sitting in the air stream from these units my legs go numb and fall off and I can't type. Now my guess is that it would be fine to set the units to maintain, say, 21-22 deg. C (70-71F) to make it more comfortable for those of us who have to work in there. This argument comes up a lot, and my position is that the room doesn't need to be refrigerated, *per se*...it only needs to be prevented from overheating. Consequently I maintain that a *consistent* temperature of 'pleasant' for the room is almost as good a consistent temperature of 'a bit nippy'. Is there a definitive answer to this?"
After an hour or so of sitting in the air stream from these units my legs go numb and fall off and I can't type.
You type with your legs that is awesome.
42.
Why not fork?
I'm a server admin at Hotmail. We keep our server room at about 300 degrees F. They don't call it HOT mail for nothin'.
cpeterso
4.2 kelvin. liquid helium. turbo charge your servers with superconductivity.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Otherwise, keep it at 65 degrees, and either learn to deal with it, or learn to bring a sweater with you.
Hey, c'mon now! Give him some advice he can actually use! He specifically said "After an hour or so of sitting in the air stream from these units my legs go numb and fall off and I can't type." You should be advising him to "learn to wear pants" instead!
GMD
watch this
"Is there a definitive answer to this?"
Buddy... this is SLASHDOT.
I pay close to $120 a month to keep my apartment 62F year round, and I save a huge amount of money because I don't have to constantly repair and replace equipment.
Really? I too keep my apartment at 62 F year round, and I've been having problems with some of my more sensitive equipment. In particular, I'm noticing some shrinkage. Do you have any advice?
"_I_ spend $1400 on A/C every year. Aren't I cool???"
As a matter of fact, yes.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
I've been in a good number of very large data centres (both colo and in-house), and I have yet to see one that is designed for the comfort of humans. Fact is, once the box is installed, you really don't have any good reason to wander in there. In fact, there is a large manufacturing facility in the Pittsburgh area which will not let you on the floor unless you have a valid change control ticket.
That having been said, you data centre is going to have to be at whatever temperature the equipment needs. So, if you've got several racks of Clariion, you're going to need to pump more air in than if you're just running a couple racks of PCs. Sometimes, in order to keep some peices of equipment cool, you need to pump so much air that the rest of the DC is cooler. I was in a DC that was comfortably at about 70 or so before they installed a few racks of storage gear. That gear started getting temp alarms until they cranked the thermostat down to 65. (And that wasn't a result of the equipment being too far out from the AC. One of the units was only a few floor tiles away).
Keeping your DC around 65 or 70 is probably your best bet. You could play with it, by bringing the temperature up a little bit and seeing what breaks, but that's not real smart. Wear heavy clothing if you have to into the DC, but primarily you should avoid going in there unless you absolutely can't avoid it. That's not workspace, that's equipment space.
On a more amusing note... I worked for a very small company once which had some PCs in the data centre which ran a CTI application. There were these two women that refused to do their work from their desk and insisted in working at the rack in the DC. The room was pretty well packed wall-to-wall -- when I had to get in to do physical cable moves, or server installs, or what-have-you, I was forever tripping over these two. The solution was simple: I cited an increased amount of hardware in the room and brought the temp down to the lowest setting. They found it so hard to work while trying to keep their elbows over their chests, they finally went back to their desks and worked from there. There *can* be advnatages to having an overly-cold DC.
There's no way that's the problem, we've tested them on Mars
I hope you replied, "That's funny, cause if you don't fix them they're goin in Uranus"
Thanks, I'm here all week...
I, I, I believe someone has his stapler...