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Cooler Servers or Cooler Rooms?
mstansberry writes "Analysts, experts and engineers rumble over which is more important in curbing server heat issues; cooler rooms or cooler servers. And who will be the first vendor to bring water back into the data center?"
I agree, both solutions would help. Our room is a nice cool 62.5. Best condtions to work in!
Cooler rooms also keep others out... we get a lot of, its so cold, and they leave. That's golden =)
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
"Roger Schmidt, chief thermodynamics engineer at IBM, [recently] admitted that, while everyone knows servers are one day going to be water-cooled, no one wants to be first, believing that if their competitors still claim they are fine with air cooling, the guy who goes to water cooling will rapidly drop back in sales until others admit it is necessary."
you know, some times the market actually rewards innovation. tough to believe, i know, and this isn't innovation, it's common sense, but mfg's are afraid of this? come on, people, the technocenti have been doing this for their home servers for a long, long time, let's bring it into the corporate world.
nothing worth possessing isn't possessed. or something.
We used to do exactly this in an ops building belonging to the company I worked for in 1997. The server room was cut off from the rest of the heating system in the building, with piped cold air from outside.
It took 8 months until the first servers started dying from the intense corrosion & pitting on equipment closest to the air outlets. We were bringing in air that while it was ice cold, was unfiltered and brought pollution in from 2 storeys above street level, and I dare say more moisture than the air conditioned recycled worker-breathable air.
Filters fixed the problem.
I'm not an EE, but it's something I've always wondered about. I don't have a datacentre, but I do have far too many computers: why does my machine room contain about fifteen wall warts, all producing slightly different DC voltages and plugged in to their various appliances via fifteen different non-standard connectors? Why not just have one low-voltage standard and have all these things plug into that?
One possible reason is that (IIRC) power losses vary according to current, not voltage. By increasing the voltage, you can push the same amount of energy down a wire using a smaller current, which limits losses. This is why power lines use very high voltages.
This means that if you produce regulated 5V at one side of your datacentre, by the time it's reached the other side it's not 5V any more. But it should be easy to get round this by producing 6V and having DC regulators; they're very small and extremely efficient these days.
However, I suspect that the main reason why this kind of thing isn't done is inertia. There's so much infrastructure in place for dealing with high-voltage AC supplies that you wouldn't get off the ground using DC.
Well, since my last company had most of their servers in a data center room where we had two different floods, I'd say I have a pretty good idea which hosting company will be the first to bring water into the data center ...
The first problem was snow that piled up outside, combined with clogged drains, that led to melting snow coming in through the wall where some pipes entered/exited. Since their layout was power in the floor and networking in the ladder racks, it's actually pretty amazing that a large portion of the power plugs and switches still worked, even while being submerged in 6 inches of water.
So about a year after they had taken care of that issue, a water pipe for a bathroom on the floor above burst, and of course the water came down right in our room in the hosting center. It wasn't so bad until the flourescent lights in the ceiling filled up and started to over flow. We were able to limit the damage by throwing tarps over the tops of all the racks (there goes your cooling effect, though), but we still lost about 100K worth of server and switching equipment.
So yeah, water in the data center? It's been done.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
We use -48VDC, and it's a pain in the ass to find power supplies for modern hardware.
Whenever we need something outside of normal ATX, we wind up paying custom development fees.
No one makes DC to DC power supplies that are worth a damn, and the few vendors who do sell them (Sun, IBM, etc) charge an arm and a leg above and beyond what we pay to have them custom engineered.
Reduce power consumption
Reduce heat in the server room
Improve reliability
Best regards.
Bob was changing backup tapes when something caught his eye at his feet. Looking through te holes in the cooling tile in the raised floor, something was moving, like a bundle of shiny snakes. Looking closer, we had 1/2" of water down there!
We spent several hours with a tiny shop vac (we need a bigger one!) emptying the water and being thankful Bob had seen it before it got high enough to get into the power conduits.
An A/C unit drain pan had a clogged drain, so the sump pump couldn't carry the water away. Whoever had the units installed had purchased water alarms, but *they had never been hooked up*. Now *that* was a brilliant move.
We now have water alarms down there.
Meanwhile, the room stays about 70 degrees, and the servers stay comfy, as do we. I like it that way,
I wonder if a more directed cooling might work better. For instance, change the rack/chassis design such that it expects airflow to come from the top and exit the bottom, then duct the A/C right into the top of each rack. While you would still keep the rest of the room cool, it just seems to be wasteful to keep a several hundred square foot room at 60 degrees the whole time when the real goal is to keep the equipment in the racks from baking itself into oblivion.
I also agree with the guy in the article, liquid cooling in the server room is going to happen eventually. I got to see the difference a simple watercooling system made on a P4 3.02GHz Extreme Edition chip, stuffed in the same case with a GeForceFX5950. Even with some serious fans the case was borderline overheating in games. Part of the problem being that the room it was in wasn't kept that cool, and the owner had it in a cabinet in his desk (it is what that cabinet was designed for). He dropped a liquid cooling system into it, and now the thing is always nice and frosty. And even with the jolts and jostling of taking the system to several LAN parties, the liquid cooling system is still leak free and rock solid. His experience has actually made me consider one for my own next system. For a server, where the system usually sits still long enough to collect a measureable amount of dust, water cooling may be a very good choice. If it's installed properly the likelyhood of leaks is low, and the performance can be very good. Heck, I can see it now, our server rooms will eventually have a rack or two devoted entirely to the radiators for the liquid cooling systems of servers, which run hot enough form plasma.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Of the many server rooms I've been in, the most effective cooling I've seen has been to enclose the racks into sealed cabinets (adding a cheapish layer of physical security as well, by locking the things) and then piping cooled air directly into the top of the cabinets.
:)
If you buy your own racks to put gear in, then getting these things is easy, if you buy whole racks from a vendor with gear in it already (custom systems type of thing), then the thing comes in a cabinet which usually has some kind of a fan/vent arrangement on top. Rip that off, attach some ducting straight up to the ducts running across the rows, and voila, cool air flows straight down and out the bottom.
All you need is to build your room with several ducts running across the ceiling, with removable plates every so often. The AC system pushes air into that, which then goes directly into the racks. You don't even need to cool the room really, since the air coming out of the racks gets cool enough to keep the room itself cool. The servers in the racks stay at fairly chilly temp in there. Only downside is when you need to open one, you're hit in the face with this freezing air pouring out of the rack.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.