Emergency Cooling with Limited Power?

Nos. asks: "I work for a small webhosting company (I'm on leave from my Gov't job) and we've started having some power problems. Actually someone managed to blow out the substation powering the area so we're piggy backing off another one, and they're slowly powering more and more things off. Elevators, lights, etc. are gone. Since the building we work in has a few IT company's working it in, they're trying as hard as they can to keep the A/C running, but its not looking good. As such, the possibility exists that our server room could get very warm, very quickly. Since we've already powered off everything that's not essential, we're starting to look at ways to keep the room cool without using a lot of power. Generators an small A/C units are a last resort as it would mean holes in the walls. The only thing we've been able to come up with is dry ice and some small fans to circulate the air. Of course this is happening as we're heading in to a week of over 30C days. Does Slashdot have any ideas?"

Comments

Dude.

[Naikrovek]

You should have thought of this LONG before now.

Why do you host at a place without dual power companies providing power?

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant A/C on EACH power provider?

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant power generators?

Just how "essential" is the stuff you're hosting?

How is it important that you're "on leave from [your] Gov't job"?? That's no excuse (if it was meant to be) for not jumping on top of that HUGE MASSIVE INSANELY rediculous situation your servers are in right now, and taking the steps to fix it the very first day you started at that job.

in fairness maybe you started today, but i think somehow that you've had time to fix this before now.

Re:Dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

... Dude. It's a small webhosting firm. It is utterly unreasonable for clients to expect a small webhosting firm to have the capital or clout to seamlessly handle a disaster, and it is even more unreasonable for someone who seems experienced in this stuff to expect them to.

Why do you host at a place without dual power companies providing power?

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant A/C on EACH power provider?

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant power generators?

Because some of us live in the really-real-world where you spend real-time and pay real-money for real-services. We're not talking about a $50 million Exodus datacenter here. We're talking about a small webhosting company. It's possible that he's running less than 100 websites total. Put things in perspective. With that small of a company, it's hard to afford to have someone on duty 24 hours to take care of the occasional problems, and most of the time you're at the mercy of your upstream provider anyway so there's not much that can be done. And you want dual redundant everything? He should probably be multihomed on OC-3s too?

I run a small webhosting company too. I do have a disaster plan, but it's a real world disaster plan, and quite frankly if the disaster is serious enough, one of my options is to just close the doors and cut my losses. If my city gets obliterated by a nuclear weapon, then no thanks, I have better things to be doing than keeping my servers running.

There are way too many obsessive sysadmins out there who are appalled at anyone who doesn't have 100% uptime. Get a life.

Just how "essential" is the stuff you're hosting?

Not essential enough to go through nor afford all the stuff that you're implying he's an idiot for not doing.

Re:Dude.

[Nos.]

You should have thought of this LONG before now.
There's a lot of things that were out of whack when I started here about 6 months ago, I'm working on it. Redundant air was just not something I considered

Why do you host at a place without dual power companies providing power?
Because we don't have two power companies here. I live in Saskatchewan (Canada) and we only have one power company

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant A/C on EACH power provider?
The office is located on the University or Regina campus. The campus provides heating and cooling to every building here. Redundant A/C is out of the question on that kind of scale for this small a community (~225,000)

Why do you host at a place without dual redundant power generators?
We have natural gas generators, however, they only power certain things within this building, not the A/C for the campus.

Just how "essential" is the stuff you're hosting?
Depends who you talk to. Our clients think they're sites are critical to their business. If we can't maintain uptime, we lose clients. If we lose enough clients we go out of business, and I lose this job, and get stuck going back to the Government, something I DON'T want to do

The Gov't Job was for anyone reading my profile and wondering why I say I work for the Gov't and now say I work for a web hosting company. Its not an excuse. Secondly, I have been working on improving things here, but I was brought in for a development project which recently finished. Only lately have I started to work on the network, servers, facilities, etc.

I'm not sure how well it would work, but ....

[jefeweiss]

Buy two big high output fans, the biggest and most powerful that will fit in the door to the server room. Stack them one on top of the other in the door. Face the one on the bottom in to suck relatively cooler air from the floor into the server room, and the one on the top out of the room, to suck the relatively hotter air at the top of the room out. This will work better if you can get the one on top all the way to the top, and seal the rest of the space in between. Also, this isn't going to be as effective as the server room opens onto a long hall, as if it opens onto a big room.

If the server room is on the bottom floor of your building you could also prop open the fire doors on the stairs so all the cool air in the building flows downhill to the floor your computers are on. This is going to be a fire code violation if your building is tall enough.

Get rid of excess heat in the first place

[forged]

Well it is a bit late for that, but if you were a large datacenter hosting a lot of managed servers, wouldn't you consider low-power solutions such as....

"So, when Transmeta Corp. came along in early 2000 and announced a processor that was 85 percent to 90 percent of the mobile Pentium's performance with a fifth of the power consumption, it was a no-brainer," Hipp said.
The result was the RLX System 324, a blade configuration that packs more punch into a smaller space than any other server on the market?up to 336 blades in a single, 42-unit, industry-standard rack (..)

It goes without saying that a box that necessitates 80-90% less power than an equivallent Intel or AMD, produces less heat. (from an older but insightful eWeek article.)