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Server Cooling Solution for Small Business?
An anonymous reader asks: "What cheap yet effective cooling solutions are available for servers for a small business? Keep in mind, I don't mean a small 100 employee business but rather 10 full time employees. The place is based out of an ex-residential unit, outfitted for the business. As with any small business, there wasn't any real consideration for IT needs when the place was built. The organization is getting its first real in-house server and all rooms within the unit are already in use, meaning the server must live nicely in office space, with humans, where the existing switch is. The organization follows a policy of turning off PCs and air-conditioning out of hours and in the Australian summer, the unit easily heats up past 35 degrees Celsius, exceeding the maximum operating ambient temperature for the server. Now, I can convince them of leaving the air-conditioner on, but the humans may not want the room as cool as I want it for the server and it's difficult to ensure that no one has turned it off. Are there any other cheap yet effective cooling solutions for a small business where the budget is extremely limited?"
Literally. If it's a residential unit, there must be closets. Put a wall mounted AC in it and pack it full. Use two if you have them, and need the room.
If you are in an ex-residential space then there is most likely a garage or utility room/closet that you can use for things such as your network switch, telephone, PBX, servers, etc. Why not put your server there and install a small air conditioner.
I have a friend who runs a small business out of his home. He uses a spare bedroom as an office and made the bedroom closet his server room. He installed a split-unit air conditioner to keep the closet cool.
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You can look at getting an air conditioned rack, though you'll probably spend more for the rack than for your whole server setup. Likewise, any carrier grade type servers will have the same cost issues.
You could outsource everything, use one of those Internet based backup services. Or co-locate a server someplace and rsync all your desktops data to it nightly.
If they're not keen on Air Conditioning a large office all the time, is there a closet you can take for a server room? You just need enough room for a server and AC unit. If the area doesn't have an outside wall for a standard wall AC unit, consider a portable AC unit, where the heat exhaust could be piped outside via normal ducting.
Other than that, run it over spec, keep good backups, and make sure management knows by not taking care of the environment, they're being penny wise and pound foolish.
If you're hitting 35C ambient temperature, your internal temps shouldn't be much over 55C unless you have inadequate air circulation. Get some SMART monitors on the hard drives to watch their temperature sensors and use an application like Motherboard Monitor to alert you when you approach your CPU's critical temperature. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Speaking only from my own experience, quality hard drives have operating temperatures up to 60 Celsius. A Dual-Core Opteron can operate anywhere from 65C to 83C depending on what chip you have (PDF). A word of advice: larger fans at lower RPMs tend to push more air and are quieter. If noise isn't a concern, then go with larger fans at higher RPMs. Also, if you can maintain a higher total pressure inside the server case it will help prevent dust from settling and limit how often you need to pop the top and clean it out, but it also puts more stress on the intake fans which may lead to more rapid failures. I've never collected statistics on this sort of thing so the increase in failure rate may be negligible.
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