Raised Flooring Obsolete or Not?

mstansberry writes "In part three of a series on the price of power in the data center, experts debate the merits of raised flooring. It's been around for years, but the original raised floors weren't designed to handle the air flow people are trying to get out them today. Some say it isn't practical to expect air to make several ninety-degree turns and actually get to where it's supposed to go. Is cooling with raised floors the most efficient option?"

Comments

The future is not in raised flooring...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but in lowered walling.

Where else?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else am I going to store my beer so it can stay cold and the boss not find it?

Re:Where else?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else am I going to store my beer so it can stay cold and the boss not find it?

The problem is your boss. At a previous company my boss was the one that insisted we have a "beer fridge" hidden in the back of our server room, out of site of the rest of the company.

Re:Where else?

[hamburger lady]

man, i'd much rather have you for an employee than the guy asking where to hide the bodies..

Re:Where else?

[KidFunkyFly]

What fun is it when the halon system goes and there isn't a risk of being decapitated by a flying floor tile?

Re:Where else?

[ikkonoishi]

So the server was offsite? No wonder he was okay with it.

Re:Where else?

[Fortran IV]

Funniest story I ever heard involved a 1970's computer-room retrofit into an old commercial chemistry building. The computer room was a big area in the center with a hall completely around it, and small labs all along the outside of the hall. They ran more AC and put in a raised floor, but otherwise just pretty well crammed the mainframe in. One thing they didn't consider was the fire system.

Sprinklers are as bad for chemical labs as for computers, but what the building had instead wasn't much better. The whole installation was pre-Halon; it used a CO2 dump system, with a big tank outside. (I don't know how much the tank held, but it cost them $10,000 to fill it.) In order to smother files without killing people, the CO2 vented at floor level. That's right—under the raised floor of the computer room.

Did I mention that the chemical labs around the outside were still in use? Every time a chemist set something on fire and pulled the panic handle, the system flooded CO2 into the entire building. Foom! Up would fly the floor panels, accompanied by huge clouds of dust.

—Drifting right into the old-fashioned optical smoke detectors. Foom! again. More panels blown loose, more dust flying, panicked chemists fleeing in every direction, babbling in German and Hindustani and Farsi. The system would cycle over and over until the tank was empty.

The fellow that told me about this place was amazed that, although the system got triggered two or three times while he worked there, completely emptying the tank every time, they never shattered any disk platters or CPU boards by flash-freezing them. But he did tell of coming back into the building to find the keypunch operator's potted plant frozen stiff.

Re:Where else?

[rubycodez]

easy, you upgrade to a whiskey habit, which requires no refrigeration and makes no telltale psssst when you open it. Also, indefinite shelf life, sealed or open. when I worked for a dot-com in 2000-2002, we were allowed beer after 5:00pm, and my boss, the CTO, said it was ok if I could keep a bottle of hard stuff in my desk so long as I waited till past 5 before taking a shot.

sub-floor

[backdoorman]

But then where will we keep the bodies?

Re:sub-floor

[Infinityis]

Lowered ceilings. To justify the cost, just say you need it for the recessed lighting.

Re:sub-floor

[b1t r0t]

Lowered ceilings. To justify the cost, just say you need it for the recessed lighting.

Downside: needs more reinforcement, especially if you need to hide an overweight PHB. Upside: if the odors go upwards, the bodies will remain undetected longer.

Or you could just use old enclosed racks as sarcophagi, hiding them in the back of the storage room behind stacks of obsolete boxen.

Oh...so it's for practial reasons...

[Infinityis]

I thought the raised flooring was just to make the people working there look taller and more impressive, kinda like how they do with pharmacists.

Turns?

[archeopterix]

Some say it isn't practical to expect air to make several ninety-degree turns and actually get to where it's supposed to go.

Tell that to the methane in my bowels.

Re:Turns?

[geoffspear]

Thanks for reassuring me about this.

After reading this very insightful article summary, I was planning to completely replace all of the ductwork in my house on the assumption that air can't go around corners. You just saved me several thousand dollars.

I got a totally impracticable solution right here!

[WormholeFiend]

Just have the whole data center submerged in an inert solution like the one made by 3M (fluorinert?), and have the workers wear scuba equipment.

Most. Efficient. Cooling. Evar!

Raised Floor Fun!

[bsd4me]

... overhead runs are much easier and cleaner ...

But it also eliminates the joy of making fun of coworkers who gets lost in a raised floor, or closing them in when they go on a hunt for something...

Re:Raised Floor Fun!

[jwdb]

I know a cooling technician who once got lost in a company's ductwork. Crawled around for an hour or two, found a spot where his cell got a bit of reception, and called up someone with a map to guide him out.

Yikes...

Re:Raised Floor Fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

If he did not know where he was at, how in the hell did the person he call know?

"Make a left at the next tee, grab the bonus health and the chain gun and keep heading toward the light. Shoot out the fan and drop down into the control room from the overhead vent. Duke, can you still hear me?"

Re:I got a totally impracticable solution right he

[markana]

Oxygenate the fluid, and you can even dispense with the scuba gear...

Going to have to bugdet for towels, though...

Re:Army Research Labs solution...

[bigpat]

the guide said they used one of the computers in the room to simulate the airflow in that room so they could align the systems for better cooling.

I bet that computer simulated the best cooling for itself.

Call in the aliens

[freeweed]

That only works until you have a situation where you need to cut the green wire with the yellow stripe, NOT the black wire with the white stripe, in order to shut down your server before it explodes. That oxygenated fluid is pink, making colour detection damn near impossible.

Now, if you're willing to host an alien spaceship at the bottom of your datacentre, maybe they could lend a hand...

Re:No Raised Floors?

[rebelcan]

Okay, screw this post about putting the servers in a giant tank filled with a coolant. Put the servers in a vertical wind tunnel so you can practice your sky diving while swapping a hard disk!

Re:Hey -- who's the experts anyways?!?!

[coleblak]

Hey, McCloud, get offa my ewe!

But better yet ...

[Martix]

A place to hide the bosses body and won't stink up the place :P

Re:Army Research Labs solution...

[hackstraw]

How geeky is that!

Some call that planning and engineering.

An engineering firm that was hired to do some upgrades to our 2 room computer facility which included a fan to circulate air between the two rooms. We asked what the CFM of the fans were and how often the air would be exchanged between the rooms. Their answer: Dunno, never thought of that. Good thing we did.

Re:So you don't care - who cares?

[zyxmaw]

In Norway we open the door. Its quite cheap.