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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."
Now that's cool.
Well, if your site is hosted by that Data Center, it just got a lot hotter in that bubble!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Wonder if the bubbles are working now that it's been SLASHDOTTED!!
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Do not place datacenter over head. Keep out of reach of children.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Because... stuff always needs more duct tape.
"(including two 1.5 ton ACs)"
"Ton" here refers to a "ton of cooling," a measure of power. It was originally intended to mean "the power required to melt one ton of ice in 24 hours." Since that varies based on a bunch of conditions, it was pegged at 12,000 Btu/h.
When they changed the definition of "calorie" to mean 4.1868 J, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and grams to pounds gives us a conversion factor of 1 ton of cooling being exactly 3 516.852 842 066 7 W.
In other words, each a/c unit is about 5.25 kW of cooling each, or 10.5 kW total.
Oh, and 83 degrees Fahrenheit is about 301 kelvin and a ten-degree Fahrenheit difference is a difference of 6 kelvin.
(According to my old HVAC prof, there's been little to no progress in "metricizing" the industry in the US. Having used both systems in his course, I'd say I prefer US units, if only because the unit descriptions on things like insulative properties make more sense when the units for thickness and area don't naturally cancel each other out.)
(And it could be worse. Most home a/c units are labelled on the box as putting out x number of Btu, suggesting they're disposable.)
(Well, they probably are...)
First off, a "real" data center needs a little more than 1.5 Tons of cooling; that will barely cool a single rack in a real data center.
Insulation is always a nice idea, be the fact of the matter is that to reject the heat from the space you need to provide a means of heat trasnfer. Generally, that requires a temperature differential between your heat source and the outside. If it is cooler outside than in the space, not much is required. If it is warmer, you will have to take advantage of thermodynamics and use a compressorized cycle. This can be more or less efficient, depending on the difference in inside and outside temperatures.
(A typical data center operates with a 95-110F outside design temperature, and attempts to deliver 48F chilled water to the CRAC units (Computer Room Air Conditioning). This forces about 50% of the energy consumed by the computers to be used (again) to cool the equipment.)
Call an engineer when everything melts down...
I doubt anyone had a chance to cache these pics.
At least now I know where my tax money went! Termite tents! That's at least more believable than that $15,000 toilet seat and $20,000 hammer :-)
Peter.
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....
--
Clean dry cold air. Self sufficient oil. Great physical security
If someone has a cache, I'll host.
email me the goods.
thumper **AT** alderflats.com
Pretty Pictures!
I'll tell you Jeb, if that's how the Nebraska State Patrol runs a datacenter, makes me wonder about their crime lab...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
MirrorDot is upf 7bbfed3ed64/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e90ad5cab7cfb4869cc0
I hate to burst your bubble, but you just got slashdotted.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
A mirror of the thumbnails is available here.
Did anyone else just hear a popping sound?
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.
keeping a datacenter cool? Thats nothing..
try moving to india to try and get your job back from dell only to get dysintry and heat stroke, lose your wallet and end up working in low grade indian miget porno to get enough money to buy a can of coke, only to get typhode.
Bubbles...pfff...
Ps. I'm writing this from Iran, send help.
I think that it is great that they are looking to lower costs. It strikes me as they are trying to be inovative. Considering the outlandous federal defict and even my state's defict (colorado), I think they could use more like them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The first point is possible, but do you really think "jebba.net" is a "government agency"? It's either a shared server at some hosting company, or his own on a DSL.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes, but plastic tarp and duct tape ain't the way. In fact it's probably against OSHA rules, for good reasons.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You want cool and cheap? Move your datacenter to the North of Siberia.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
its been said before, but for the sake of trying.
f 7bbfed3ed64/index.html
PLEASE POST PIC/MOVIE THREADS WITH CORAL MIRRORS OR MIRRORDOT MIRRORS OR A MIRROR OF A KIND.
partial thumbnail pics only mirror here:
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e90ad5cab7cfb4869cc0
Wouldn't breakfast cereal and beer keep the data center cool? I mean the machines, not the admins. ;)
use the great lakes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...like we do.
25 watts per CPU, 50 watts per system.
Period.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
Remember those XTs (640 KB) 10 MB hard-drive, 4.77 Mhz. The management did not want to a/c the office(India), so there were vendors who sold glass racks with a window a/c unit to keep the unit cool. And careful with the turbo switch...
hey have you guys seen our ductape and plastic sheets?
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I wouldn't feel comfterable using a 1.5 Ton to cool the servers i have at my house.
We have 25 tons of cooling in our core server room (at a small community college) and are looking at replaceing our current solution.....or maybe i should ugilify my cabinets.
I'm a cucumber
Having recently faced a similar problem (though on a much smaller scale), we came up with almost the same solution.
As one suggestion, though, cardboard (in 4x8ft sheets) proved a lot easier to work with than plastic sheets. For starters, the plastic requires attachment at the ceiling, and will eventually come loose under its own weight; cardboard, with a single fold in the sheet, will stand upright and support its own weight for years, assuming not too high of a humidity level. For another, cardboard won't flap around and potentially block air intakes nearly so easily as plastic will.
Believe it or not, though, what we found the most effective way to make use of barely adequate AC - Don't treat the room as a closed system. You've basically used the plastic sheets to build giant chimneys - Now take advantage of that fact, and along with a high volume fan above each rack, just exhaust the air at the top outside rather than recycle it back into the room... Think of it this way... You spec your cooling to work to perhaps 110F ambient, right? At the top of a full rack, with 50-60F going in the bottom, you probably have 120-130F going out the top. Does it take more work to cool 130F, or 110F, back to 50F? Not to mention, your normal ambient shouldn't come anywhere near 110F...
I'll add more pics, if I get them.
http://forumpics.info/cooling/
Pretty Pictures!
Famous last words...
That's why it pays to have that little asterisk next to my UID. I get to read the stories before the servers explode, killing thousands upon thousands of innocent victims and tramples their cities and shoots lasers at giant moths....no wait...wait, no that's Godzilla. But still the asterisk, early story reading thing, that's true, I'm almost sure of it.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
"(more like a termite tent)"
... The internal structure of these mounds can be quite complex, with ventilation chimneys for active temperature control" Need I say more?!
"Most termite species are tropical or subtropical, but a few live in temperate regions." I'd posit that even fewer live in a properly cooled data center. So, on the surface (no pun intended), this doesn't seem to be a good comparison.
But reading further into the Wikipedia article: "Termites have biting mouthparts and are soft-bodied, of moderate to small size. They live in dark nests and tunnels, except when the winged alates emerge to leave their parent colony." When comparing termites to geeks, they both seem to have biting mouth parts and the geeks are definitely soft-bodied. And of smaller size. And, like the termites, true geeks live in their parent's basement.
"Termites cannot themselves digest the wood that they consume." Few geeks can live on chewed-up pencils. So again, another similarity.
Lastly, Termites construct extremely large and elaborate mounds to house their colonies.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
If you can fit your computers into plastic bubble made of cheap sheeting and duct tape, that is NOT a data center. It would have been easier to do what most small IT shops do - stick the servers in a small office with one of those cheesy little 1.5 ton units and shut the door.
/. when you're working in a real datacenter.
Post again to
Don't you mean great security by obscurity?
Move it away from india , back home.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
This is an outrightly dangerous fire hazard. I would strongly advise against it.
It also traps moisture which probably will condense along the plastic and end up where you don't want it.
I don't get all of the attacks about this not being a "real datacenter." Sure, I wouldn't want any of my things run from his DC, but he did say that it was a government datacenter on a budget... Surely all of us have dealt with cheap government / school people at some time who refuse to put money where its needed.
Scott Swezey
Big bubbles no troubles.
VERITAS VOS LIBERABIT
...it's about load testing his data center!
"Here's some pics to check it out." ?? Dead giveaway!
"Good news, everyone!"
Oh, you want to play that game, do you? The Mac mini I'm using to write this message can do a tad better than the Pentium M system you describe. I presently have it hooked to my Kill-a-Watt(tm) meter, and the whole system is drawing 20W from the A/C outlet. That's with disk spinning and CPU mostly idle. If I peg the CPU by doing
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null, the power usage jumps to a whopping 30W.
I've thought about alternate methods for keeping computers cool, and I started to wonder about just feeding cold air directly into the intake of the computer itself, rather than trying to surround the whole computer with cold air. Then the computer's hot air output is not polluting your cold air with hot.
What I had in mind is a sort of a system that would supply cold air through ducts (similar to the tubes that are used for hot air exhaust on a clothes dryer) at positive pressure. It'd then be a matter of just hooking these up to your fan intakes on the computer, and you'd have very cold air flowing straight through the system.
One could easily supply the required cold air through ducts by putting a big cardboard box (or wooden box, etc., etc.) on the front of a window unit, then cutting holes and attaching hoses where required.
I've wondered if anyone has tried something like this. The disadvantage is that you have to run new ducts every time you install a piece of new equipment. The advantage is that the computers are being fed with cold air directly after it passes through the air conditioner's evaporator coil while it's still cold, instead of reaching the computers after it has had a chance to mix with hot air in the room. Kind of like standing right under the A/C vent when you go indoors on a really hot summer day.
Man, with the temperature rising in my office, I'll stick to trying to keep myself cool.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
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
What you effectively did is made a mini-greenhouse.
Those admins look big, but nowhere near 3000 pounds each. Besides, if they would just log in they wouldn't have to post as AC any more.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
"two 1.5 ton AC"
I know that lots of geeks tend to gain weight, but those are big Anonymous Cowards!
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Kelvin is capitalized to differentiate it from kilo.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
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?
--
make install -not war
It is my experience that businesses short change themselves right out of quality. If one way to do that is to use Open Source or Free Software without paying someone for support (if you can't fully support it yourself), then yes that means low quality. There's no reason a company can't spend the same amount of money originally budgeted for closed source license costs on Open Source or Free software support. In many cases, I would say that these companies would benefit *much* more than those committed to closed source alternatives.
Having said that, this is a much wider issue than just software. It boils down to how companies can't do without at least the appearance of quality (customers wouldn't stand for it) but that also won't pay for real quality (they treat it as if it just costs too much).
A similar idea is the true cost of the beef you eat. What is the total impact to the planet for the production of the meat you eat?
looks like two of them were not enough to keep thier servers going up in flame... "Pics to check out..." /.
They either wanted to load test their systems or they forgot to read the warning on the bubble wrap that said don't inhale the air from inside the bubbles... My I suggest ten times as much cooling piped directly around your CPS's if your are going to even think about positng "Pics to check out" on
flinging poop since 1969
end up working in low grade indian miget porno to get enough money to buy a can of coke
I'm not a midget, you insensitive clod!
Assuming you live in an area with outside temperatures below 40 C (104 F), is it not a lot more energy efficient to build strong ventilation with outside air rather then an AC?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Heh. So, which has more CPU power? A G4 or a Pentium M?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
plastic is not good enough to keep the cold temperature inside. better using styrofoam layered with alloy panel as a wall
Why? oh wait.. maybe I should ask that question.. ugg.. geeks..
Obama = Socialism.
Has there actually been any sort of study to prove this new setup is more effcient? Aside from the reasons mentioned above:
-High temperature differentials on the insulation
-Lost productivity from datacenter workers
How about the fact that by undersizing the a/c you may be forcing the unit to act very ineffciently? I'm no mechanical engineer, but i work with them and from what i understand either undersizing or oversizing an a/c can ruin the effciency of the whole system.
Also you need to take into account that the heat needs to be dispersed twice, once from the rack to the space and again from the space to outside, compounding ineffciencies.
I suspect this could be a potential "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish" sort of situation. You know, those same people who balk at spending $10,000 more in equipment to save $20,000 in energy over 3 years.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I have had the same type of problem.. too many servers, to little Air Conditioning. The accountants have no problems with buying 5 more servers to support a particular project, but spending $10k on AC upgrades is not permitted.
In our case the AC could hold the room in the mid 70F running continously. This lead to a compressor failure every 6 months and no backup AC. Temps in the room would quickly soar in the 100-110F until servers began failing or shutting down. (This failure always occurred on weekends, when the building air was shutdown and the datacenter was cooling its normal load plus leakage from a 90F degree building thru uninsulated walls.) By the time IT staff made it onsite several servers would be dead.
The solution was temp based emergency shutdown. Take a DB9 female connector and solder a 10k resistor between CTS and DTR and attach a two connector cable to RTS and CTS. Run the two wire cable to the Y and R(or RC) terminals of a common home thermostat. Set the thermostat to cool mode and the setpoint to 85. Plug the DB9 into a spare serial port.
Install UPSd or use the UPS tab in windows to assign a generic UPS to that port and set a 5 minute shutdown on AC failure. When the thermostat turns on (indicating temp is above the 85F setpoint) the cable will simulate an power failure on a old dumb UPS and shutdown the system.
OK Im selling my stocks.. I just saw another "tech bubble" *ducks*
Alaska's Real Estate on The Rise!!! World Wide Interest in Outsourcing Datacenter to Alaska. The following is a Map of the newly build Megapolis in Alaska DDD DMD DDD D:Datacenter Facilities M:Megapolis Due to the high temperatature of Datacenter Heat from the various Datacenter surounding the Megapolis, Eng and Geeks working on the facility enjoy tropical weathers in the megapolis. Secure your piece of DigitalGold Now!!!!
As one suggestion, though, cardboard (in 4x8ft sheets) proved a lot easier to work with than plastic sheets.
Have any of you guys ever heard of the concept of a "fire hazard"?
Believe me, you do not want to be within a city block of this thing when it decides to go up in smoke.
How did the "government agency" allow the pictures to be taken? Even in my private datacenter, there's a strict no photography policy.
Just curious.
I don't know if the submitter is reading the comments or not, but somebody should tell him...
The rack legs aren't for earthquakes. In an earthquake the rack would just tip to the side anyway. The legs are there to prevent some moron who slides out all the rail mounted equipment in the rack at the same time from getting crushed by a falling rack.
While the norm in my view is "too hot", I've noticed that when things get too hot, which can mean in the high 20's Celsius (80's Fahrenheit), low 30's C. (90's F.), or even high 30's C. (100's C.), machines start breaking down. And usually they begin to break down one after another. I've worked at some Fortune 100 companies that could probably trim their sysadmin staff by a couple of people if they just kept their server rooms a little cooler. I've also had situations where when a room reached a certain temperature, quantity turned to quality and machines began breaking down one after another.
In terms of me telling people whose rooms are too hot, I always do. Usually the smaller the company, which means the smaller the room, the more they listen to me. Big companies, big rooms usually just ignore my protests that 30 degrees C. for a machine is too hot.
Currently we have 12 servers, running inside an warehouse in Texas, with NO airconditioning. Proper ventlation of the servers and room, and we have experienced NO problems for over two years.
Of course these are older servers, that have plenty of room and clearance in their cases. Those super compact R1 servers with a ton of heat in a small area are just asking for problems. All of that is due to centers thinking they need to have a 40LB cat in a 10LB bag.
...to cut a hole in the plastic for the network cables, cause the server is not responding.
I agree that the metric system is better, but when you're dealing with HVAC systems in the U.S., trying to do everything in SI and then convert to English at different points would add a great deal of trouble. The programs that calculate cooling loads have English unit outputs, and expect English unit inputs. The catalogs for U.S.-centric equipment are figured in English units (there are SI catalogs out there, but they're hard to get, and the equipment itself is typically designed in multiples of tons or Btu/hr). So I'd support a conversion to metric, but it hasn't happened yet, so I'll stick with English for now.
Having spent many hours in server rooms, freezing my butt off, (As you usually only have to do major work in the summer, on weekends, when your dressed for it.... not) I've often wondered why racks/servers aren't designed with an intake on one end and an outtake on the other. Or at least just a sealed rack with a connection at the top/bottom. (It'd be like a freezer section for servers, you could even leave notes, like IPs in the frost on the glass!) Now granted it would most likely be doomed to be vendor specific, but we're used to that with the rails already, right? >;^)
Seriously, you'd think cooking the units would be much more efficient. You could lock down things like humidity, and even cool things well below what makes sense now (power wise that is).
Oh well, I suppose all of that makes way to much sense.
Ever wonder why computers are made of metal? Why the plastic pieces are made of plastics that meet flammability performance standards?
Tiny Tim raises his hand
Yes, Tiny Tim?
Please, Mr Deacon Sir, so that if some source of ignition is present, the computer does not turn into a fireball spewing deadly poisionous smoke, Sir!
Very Good, Tiny Tim. And what happens if someone hangs up huge sheets of generic, flammable plastic in an area with lots of potential ignition sources?
Please, Mr Deacon Sir, sooner or later it catches fire, and people die. If these boneheads are lucky, Sir, someone from the Building Facilities or the Building Inspector will see this website and make them take it down, Sir.
Very good, Tiny Tim. The rest of the class is to read up on Flammability.
In the general case:
A. It is much more efficient to cool/heat only exactly what you need cool/hot.
B. It is usually more efficient to use one big cooler than many small ones - but it can depend massively on the design/cost/age of the coolers/heaters. Generally, every reversible process generates waste heat. So, unlike ACs, _typical_ electric heaters can be 100% efficient and a heatpump is technically more than 100% efficient at generating heat in your room (based on "thermal energy changed in your room / power energy used " )
So if you wrap all the servers in a small space with the inside end of the ACs, you save a lot of power from "A". Since you only have accidental AC left for the rest of the room, it can get quite hot - but only if something else makes it hot (poorly insulated exterior walls, people, sun-facing windows...)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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
A lot was saved by the government especially when they found that an existing vendor would sell them the bubble wrap at under 8 grand a square foot.
http://www.retroweb.com/prisoner/prisx60r.jpg
I don't know the regulations where you are, but the fire department here would have this plastic removed after the first inspection. This doesn't meet fire code. If that bubble wrap/plactic ever cought fire you might die from the fumes before you could evacuate the building. The sys admins may even be liable for the deaths of their co-workers. If the management approved they too would be in court. Years in jail are too high a price to pay for some managers who are too cheap to buy proper HVAC.
in cooling costs is now being used up in bandwidth expense...
Starting at HP labs, Ratnesh Sharma began work on the problem of cooling server farms two years ago.
Then work with the university of Virginia evolved from that research. Finally, in work done with Duke U. it paid off in the form of software tools that were reported at Usenix'05 [you can ignore password pop-up if you go thru the google cache] as saving 25% of cooling costs, thats can be over $1000000/year for large data centers by dynamically distributing work load to machines that are running cooler by using temperature data as input to the load balancer. [if you can get at the usenix art., Duke has basically the same paper on line. Or just read the the Usenix abstract]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Last Data-Center I visited had two helicopter turbines connected to the generators outside.
They have to test launch them every month or so, which is quite of a racket.
Energy wise, they could run 2 months without electricity, had their own (largish) water tank and were last seen discussing putting a sterling engine somewhere in the AC system so as to win a little something back from all that heat.
I met the "Support" team for the building...
Well, they were geeks. No IT geeks, but the sort of people that do plumbing and electricity and networking in a very pro way.
I saw both IT and support team working together when testing some Clustering tools.
How do you test IRL maximum latency on a fiber network for a real-time clustering soft ?
You take a Fenwick, two gigantic Fiber rolls (almost one mile fiber per roll), a "fiber crancker" and 3 servers connected to a nice and expensive fiber switch.
Lol. Now that is IT 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
This has to be the dumbest idea I have ever seen on /.
I bet the fire department inspections will go over REALLY well.
:P
Gotta love putting up flammable materials that emit toxic chemicals when burned in a data center.
Great idea, guys. I'm sure the insurance company will be thrilled when they find out.
Sheesh, at least get a couple of those ice bucket homebrew air conditioner things posted a few weeks back. Not that putting buckets of ice water in the data center is a better idea, but they're far less likely to go up in flames.
A little oversized is okay for cooling, but you really want to have the right size, or not quite enough. A overpowered cooling until will cool your house down without removing the humidity. A underpowered unit won't get your house as cool as you want, but will be more comfortable because it removes all the humidity, allowing sweat to cool you down.
Best if no AC as all. Unless you are sick or otherwise unhealthy, you don't need it. Drink a lot of water, and sit near a fan which uses less energy. (Yes this is what I do even though I have AC). Go swimming.
and vent the heat out. perferably into the heating system of the building.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The heat is actually the evil twin of the industry's other largest problem: Power delivery. As processers consume more heat, and customers install more and more CPUs, a LOT of data centers are struggling to deliver enough electricity, and then they're struggling to keep the place cool.
It's the flip side of the same problem, but while you can easily sense that the room is getting really, really warm, you can't sense that their power feeds and UPS systems are very near capacity unless there's a failure.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
(including two 1.5 ton ACs)
Wow. I, too, post anonymously every now and then. But I'm not THAT fat.
Respect bro'...
The Bunker is a data center housed in a former missile base in the UK. It's underground, which makes cooling much easier, and has highly redundant commercial power feeds in addition to the stuff they've added themselves. Being able to recycle that kind of space kept their construction costs low and keeps their cooling costs low, and it also looks cool, which has been useful for them to sell service to bankers and other reliability-paranoid types.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
- Overspecification - The customer lists *all* the specs they like from *all* the products on the market, even though no single product meets all those specs.
- Purchasing Bureaucrat requirements filtering and process formality - The vendor doesn't actually get to talk to the end user who wants the product - the vendor talks to a bunch of purchasing bureaucrats who only have a vague notion of what the end user wants, so they pad some of the requirements to be sure, and the end user has usually padded some of the requirements because he knows that the purchasing bureaucrats don't have a clue what they're doing. And the vendor can't simply sit down and talk to the end user about it, because purchasing rules usually prevent it (to prevent a whole 'nother set of ways that vendors can pad costs and rip off the government.) And usually some PHB in the process read some article in Jet Engine World or Hammer Manufacturer's Digest about some cool new innovation in jet engine hammers and wants to make sure that the end user's don't get ripped off by some vendor selling them an inferior hardware-store hammer.
- Cost Accounting for Contract Issues. When you need to buy a $5m jet engine and a $5 jet engine hammer, it's going to cost at least $1000 for the paperwork, and that gets accounted for as part of the items being purchased. So you end up with two line items in the contract, a $5,000,500 jet engine and a $505 hammer.
- Fixed vs. Variable Manufacturing Costs and Small Production Runs - Most manufacturing processes have a fixed cost to set up the manufacturing equipment and a variable cost that's the per-unit cost of making the items. So if it costs $5000 to set up the hammer-making equipment and $1 in variable costs for each hammer, Walmart is going to make a million hammers at a cost of $1+(5000/1000000) = $1.0005 each, mark them up to $10, and hold a big price-rollback sale with them marked down to $5 (which includes about a buck a hammer for advertising.) But the Air Force is going to order one mil-spec jet engine hammer with each of the ten jet engines they're buying, so they're going to pay $1 + (5000/10) = $501 per hammer, and then they're going to order a dozen mil-spec helicopter rotor hammers, which are slightly different from jet-engine hammers, so the machines need to be set up again, and they'll pay $1 + (5000/12) = $417.66 per hammer.
Would it be cheaper to order a slightly *better* hammer that can be used for both, at a cost of $2 + (5000/22) = $229/hammer? Yup, but nobody could justify the cost of doing the paperwork to explain why they're buying fancier hammers, leave aside the costs of convening a MIL-SPEC-Joint-Tactical-Hammer Design Committee, or dealing with the auditors who have to explain why Halliburton is importing thousands of $100 MIL-SPEC-Joint-Tactical-Hammer units to Iraq where they're going to use them for busting up sheetrock (which could be done with $5 Walmart hammers) or using them in place of the $500 MIL-Spec-Titanium-Tank-Wheel-Hammer which is made by a contractor in Senator Foghorn's district.Bill Stewart
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Um, that's not feasable for high-density environments such as "real" data centers because of the heat that's generated. When you're housing foods that don't generate large amounts of heat, the "freezer section" works. But when you start getting into stuff that actually creates heat, you have to have a medium to move the heat away from the source. That would be the general trend to move air from the front of the rack to the back of the rack. That's why rack's usually have about 60% of the front and back doors open for air.
When you get into higher density computing centers, it becomes even more important to move air from front to back to be able to move enough heat away from the computers to keep them operating efficiently. Thus, the "freezer section" idea would not be possible. If you want to get into computational fluid dynamics, Liebert has equipment that can create "hot aisle/cold aisle" rack arrangements within a data center. Obviously, since you've never heard of Liebert, you probably work in a smaller, low-density data room. Liebert's cooling systems are used in medium to high density computing such as supercomputing applications.
I'm assuming these guys are government workers for localities because I would be horrified if this were any permanent federal facility. I work for a federal facility and my current location's server room is somewhat "ghetto" too but only because we're a transient facility that will probably shut down in a month or two. Our regional facility, uses good ole' Liebert systems.
I really Like this idea, may go run some ducting from my AC vent into the inlet on my PC in my room, I can sweat as much as neccessary, as long as my dang shuttle doesnt keep overheating. Case temp alone with a box fan can be up to 80 C.
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