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Keeping a Data Center Cool on the Cheap
jedimaud writes "You've heard of bubble wrap, and the boy in the bubble -- now, here's a datacenter in a bubble. I work for a government agency that, like most, is trying to cut back some costs, and one of those costs is a REAL datacenter. So, we decided to wrap the whole thing in plastic (including two 1.5 ton ACs). The room hovers about 83 degrees, however, the racks in the bubble (ok, more like a termite tent) stay about 10 degree cooler. Here's some pics to check it out."
If that A/C unit freezes up/dies/etc, getting wraped in that bubble will cause those machines to overheat rather quickly...
Might be a good idea to hookup a tempature controlled moter to pull the plastic down if the A/C dies, if you know how, and have a good junk pile, you can do that cheap enough....
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Heck, why not? Run some massive fiber along the big pipeline. Only disadvantage is that you're out on the edge of the Internet, you're not safely embedded in the middle with nice redundant capabilities.
1.5 ton sounds expensive, big and awe-inspiring. It's not. Most people have cheap 1 ton a/c units in their living room walls (12,000 btu). My 12,000 (1 ton) unit is barely able to cool 3 computers. Good luck with a datacenter.
I think in this case the AC only has to work on pumping the excess heat from the servers out, and not cooling the whole room. Doesn't matter how warm the room gets outside of the bubbles.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Sure it matters -- The bubble still needs to insulate and the AC still needs to dissipate, both of which are greatly affected by the heat difference inside and outside the bubble.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
"Eek, I wouldn't do that, ever."
Then you're limiting you're usefulness in the workplace. Even if everything in the US (and exported to the US) was manufactured to SI specifications tomorrow, there's still older equipment to maintain. And if you refuse to figure out what size metric socket is needed to turn a 1/2-inch bolt because it's against your religion, that's one less application for HR to consider.
"Me, I would fire every engineer who would not use the metric system for calculations."
Straw man. I said in the sentence immediately before your selective quote that I used both in that particular course, just like just about every student in every engineering course in every US school.
"but thing is, it works,"
So do US units, to exactly the same degree. US units have been defined in terms of SI units since the Nineteenth Century.
The difference is in application. SI units tend to be tied to certain hidebound rules of use and stigmas that aren't attached to US units.
Power is always measured in watts, whether we're talking about cooling capacity or electricity. So does this mean if I plug a 5.25 kW air-conditioner into the wall that it will pull 5.25 kJ of heat out of the air per second, or that it will consume 5.25 kJ of electricity per second, or (even worse) both? In the US, you're allowed to use tons for cooling capacity even while still using watts for electrical power.
SI requires you to measure energy transfer per second, even if you're more interested in hours or days (which you are in HVAC). SI requires you to always use meters instead of centimeters in unit definitions (and cancel when able), leaving you with ambiguous units like "watt per meter-kelvin" instead of "btu-inch per hour-square foot-degree Rankine." When you're dealing with wall areas and insulation thicknesses and analyzing the heating and cooling requirements of a room over the course of hours, it's actually less work to use US units than SI units because of all the rules BIPM churns out on the proper use of SI.
"Very many troubles can be escaped this way."
Others are introduced by the insistence on one set of units over another. Was the Mars Orbiter lost because the manufacturer didn't use SI, or was it lost because NASA insisted on SI when every other customer in the aerospace industry insists on US units? The civillian world does things like measure airplane altitudes in units of 30.48 cm and ships cargo in containers 12.192 m in length because demanding that everything be done in SI would cause "very many troubles."
SI vs US is ultimately arbitrary. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But demanding that everybody in the world use SI in all instances involves as much hubris as demanding everybody in the world speak English in all instances.
Wrong, units are not mere tools, they're communication tools, and the most important is not to be familiar with the communication tools it's that everyone is able to use&understand them. The efficiency of a communication tool comes from the quality and reliability of the communication it provides.
metric is the standardised universal way to communicate, hence the tool to use.
Just as english is currently the standardized and *mostly* universal communication language and should therefore be used whenever avaible.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
This political TrollMod'ing to suppress criticism of Bush is really tiresome. Go ahead - flame me, I can take it. I'll just slice the flames to ribbons with the simple facts that elude the flamers. Their flames are their problem, anyway, if that's all they've got. FWIW, how come there's no "Flame" moderation?
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make install -not war