Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Unless you make things so cold as to prevent things from working properly, why not just do both?
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
Will probably be the first vendor to bring water into the datacenter... I believe I've seen evidence in some datacenters already.
I've always wondered this. why have duplication of a function in a server across every single server box when it could all be done in the environment. For example all servers get electricity from the server room and all servers get network from the server room so why not all servers get cooling from 10F cooling in the server room.
It makes sense!
So take your pick. To make the servers cooler, either buy new more efficient servers or buy a whacking great air con unit.
Since the servers are the things that actually do the work, I'd just get feck off servers and a feck off air-con unit to keep it all happy!
Everyones a winner!
Unlike most companies that are considering going back to water cooling, Cray has always used water cooling for their big iron. In fact, the only air cooled Crays are the lower end or smaller configured systems.
All hail the Cray X1E !
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
...you won't need as much cooling in the room. Easy enough. This will save a ton of money in the long run, not to mention the environment and all that.
"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.
That comes to mind is that it will probably be vastly cheaper to cool a rackmount specifically than to lower the ambient temperature of an entire room to the point that it has the same effect. However, I'm not entirely sure how well this scales to large server farms and multiple rackmounts.
I think the best option would be to look at having the hardware produce less heat in the first place. This would definitely simplify the rumbling these engineers are engaged in.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Yeah man.... I got stuck in one of them cool room or cooling system "rumbles". They are hardcore. I lost a buddy in one those... pen wound. I still have a scar from when a Cool Roomer stabbed me with a ISA Modem.
Water cooling? Pah! Why not take a leaf out of Seymour Cray's book - build a sodding great swimming pool, fill it with non-conductive freon, then just lob the whole computer in.
Also has the added benefit that you can see at a glance which processors are working the hardest by looking to see which are producing the most bubbles.
Wonder if you could introduce fish into the tank and make a feature of it? If you could find any freon-breathing fish, that is...
Maybe my ignorance is showing here, but does any installation use outside air for cooling? It seems that it would make sense in places that have cold winters (like here in the midwest).
You'd need a lot of filtering and/or humidity control to make that a realistic option. Better yet to make use of outside air temperature. Which is exactly what your heatpump loop or your AC cooling tower is for.
The sign on the door clearly states, "No Food or Drink". Of course, shirts are still optional.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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.
From experience of aircon failing/breaking.
At least if a server fails it's one unit that'll either get hot or shutdown which means a high degree of business continuity.
When your aircon goes down you're in a whole world or hurt. Ours went in a powercut, yet the servers stayed on because of the UPSes - hence the room temperature rose and the alarms went off. Nothing damaged, but it made us realise that it's important to have both, otherwise your redundancy and failover plans expand into the world of facilities and operations, rather than staying within the IT realm.
Just once? I have a Slip and Slide between the racks!
"Hey! Did you know that when you slashdotted that server near the Ross Ice Shelf, you caused 2 icebergs to calve? You insensitve clod!!!!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
About 4 years ago, I was touring the US National Supercomputing Center in San Diego. One of the supercomputers had a clear plexiglass side where you could see inside, and it had running water and even a waterfall. Mind you, this 'water' was running directly over the electronic components. So the guy doing the tour said that it wasn't really water, but a chemical compound similiar to water, but very nonconductive. He tells us that it costs $10,000 per barrel, and that he always gets questions about what happens if you drink it. "Well, we're not sure what happens if you drink it, but we figure one of two things will happen. It could be toxic, and you drink it and die. Or, it could be nontoxic, and when our finicial guys found out you were drinking their $10,000-a-barrell water, they'll kill you."
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
PHB: Dear god, that server is actually red hot!
SA: Yes, but notice that the room is lovely and cool.
PHB: That's all right then. By the way, what's delaying that upgrade to Windows 2003?
SA: Every time we put the CD in the drive it melts. We think it's going to be fixed in the next service pack.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Telecom equipment runs off -48VDC, and the phone company uses big batteries as their UPS.
It exists, it just is expensive.
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,
...aaaaaand where do you think that energy goes?
[DING] "Heat, Alex" "Correct, for $100."
...aaaaaand what do you think that energy loss thanks to high current means?
[DING] "Efficiency less than a modern AC->DC power supply" "Correct, for $200."
Anyone particpating in the "DC versus AC" discussion would do well to pick up a history book and read about Westinghouse and Edison. There's a reason we use A/C everywhere except for very short hauls. Modern switching power supplies are very efficient and still the best choice for this sort of stuff.
Please help metamoderate.
The industry has taken a two-pronged approach. Equipment vendors have been developing cabinets with built-in cooling, while design consultants try to reconfigure raised-floor data center space to circulate air more efficiently. The problem usually isn't cooling the air, but directing the cooled air through the cabinet properly.
There was an excellent discussion of this problem last year at Data Center World in Las Vegas. As enterprises finally start to consolidate servers and adopt blade serves (which were overhyped for years), many are finding their data centers simply aren't designed to handle the "hot spots" created by cabinets chock full of blades. Facilities with lower ceilings are particularly difficult to reconfigure. The additional cooling demand usually means higher raised floors, which leaves less space to properly recirculate the air above the cabinets. Some data center engineers refer to this as "irreversibility" - data center design problems that can't be corrected in the physical space available. This was less of an issue a few years back, when there was tons of decent quality data center space available for a song from bankrupt telcos and colo companies. But companies who built their own data centers just before blades became the rage are finding this a problem.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
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.