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Cooling the Server Room?
kolchak asks: "As the Australian summer heats up, we are looking at a cooling solution for our computer room. We have 4 racks (almost all full) with around 40 machines, switches, routers, 2 UPSs and 2 monitors. Unfortunately, its located in the middle of the office with no windows available for ventilation. We can vent the exhaust into the ceiling space which in turn is vented outside. Also, since the room is so small, we need to install any cooling device outside the room (a store room backs on which will house the cooling unit and potentially pipe hot / cold air through the wall). All the units we've seen so far need to be in the room, we just don't have the space. Anyone come across and solved this? Any ideas on good cooling units we can install easily and cheaply?"
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I'll boil it down for you:
1: Get professional help (arch, engineer, contractor)
2: Repeat #1.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
We have a phone closet and a computer room with a similar configuration (4 full racks, 2 UPS etc). We use a 12kBtu split system in our phone room, and are installing a pair of 24kBtu units in our main computer room. You can get a lot of types of them, the cheapest and easiest hang on the wall. They use a couple of pipes running outside or to the roof to the condensers. The condensers themselves are really small (compared to a single package unit). The systems we are putting in our computer room are about 6 grand apeice.
In your situation, you just run the piping through the plenem to an outside wall. You can toss the condensers just about anywhere (tho you probably want to make sure there is room to fence in the slab so some smartass cant just walk up and turn off your AC.
What you want is called split system air conditioning.
Outside you have a condensing unit that can sit on the ground or the roof, inside you have a fan coil. The two are connected via 50-100 ft of insulated copper pipe.
There is little ductwork involved, the fan coil sits in the ceiling space and simply recirculate and cools the air within the room.
Typically a configuration like this would run up to 5 tons of cooling, which is about 17KW worth of heat removed from your computer room.
If you need more cooling you can install more units.
Contact a local refrigeration contractor or refigeration equipment supplier for help, they are generally quite helpfull if they think they might get a sale out of it.
One thing is an absolute necessity: Redundancy. Make sure you have two (or more) completely separate units. Each unit should run at NO MORE than 50% of its total cooling capacity. Each has a completely separate power source, all the back to the utility hook up. Run ALL AC units, all the time. Don't plug one in and leave it turned off until you need to use it as a backup.
AC units will break down. You know this. When it happens, you will discover you have far less time to react than you think.
And if you don't have redundant cooling, you're gonna fry a lotta expensive hardware.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
APC makes a nice rackmountable unit, with 2 temperature/humidity probes, and external contact switch connections. You can monitor if the server room door is opened and send a page, for example.
Works nicely, you can communicate with it via ftp or snmp, for example.