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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
MirrorDot is upf 7bbfed3ed64/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e90ad5cab7cfb4869cc0
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.
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
...like we do.
25 watts per CPU, 50 watts per system.
Period.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
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.
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...
"(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
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!"
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.
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
"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
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.
heh, the plastic folks maybe weren't acquainted with Mr. OSHA and Mr. Confined Space and Mr. Oxygen Deficency Hazard, so adding Mr. Fire Marshall to the list of ignored people isn't a big step.
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.