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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?"
Portable Air-Conditioner.
Stick the server in it's own closet. Use a portable air-conditioner to cool the room as low as you want. Have the heat exhaust into the rest of the building.
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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.
i run several servers in Panamá, a humid tropical land, with 15 to 20 users (mail, firewall and samba server, + development server) very similar to your server, and just a few extra fans on the server case. the systems run fine, just try to blow some extra air to the hdds, and keep it clean (monthly cleaning).
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.
A small refrigerator will cost you under $100 (at least, here in the US it does), and will keep your server as cold as you want. As a bonus, it will also chill your beer.
35 isn't -that- hot, even if it is marginally outside spec. Point a floor fan at it or something if you must. The important thing is to clean the carpet fuzz, dust, wallabys and wombats out of it frequently so the heat sinks can actually work.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
as to cooling it, the answer is Yes.
More practically, you want to seal it off by itself (heavy curtains or folding partitions may be enough), the turn an AC on inside the mini-room, and threaten anyone who turns it off. I went through years of this at a former job, where the U maintained that cooling wasn't infrastructure, so our cluster's cooling was our problem. We used a portable unit for a while (and just vented the heat into the ceiling tiles, so the people above us had a warm floor), but eventually the answer was take over controllable space, and install a Liebert cold-water recirculating unit, as well as having the building airflow modified. Expensive, but we needed that headroom. Your situation is much smaller, so a closet with its own chiller and guaranteed air-circulation should do it. (Presuming, of course, that by 'server' you mean '1 to 2 proc Intel box pulling 500W max', rather than, 'I'm sharing an office with an E10K because we have nowhere else to put it.")
Rule 1 of Offices: the most expensive member sets the temperature
Rule 2 of Offices: the business data is more expensive than even a bunch of employees.
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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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I have about 10 servers at a 65 employee place - we put the servers as close to the return air duct as we could.
Most people think that cooling computers has more to do with offering cold air to them, but it's actually all about removing the hot air that they're producing.
Simple and effective.
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I live in Australia too. 3 computers I look after are located in an small room. The temperature monitoring software on the computers was warning us that things were getting to hot. So after trying a few different things we settled on putting an air conditioner in the room. This is then set on a timer controller which turns the air conditioner on for several hours, a few times a day to keep the ambient temperature in the room to an acceptable level.
In the winter we don't need to use it air con at all, in fact we are just starting to use it again now that the weather has heated up.
The other thing I have done is set up Motherboard monitor and SNMP Informant - Motherboard Monitor Edition. I then use MRTG to graph the temperature of the motherboard and cpu. With this information you can use it to only turn the air con on when it is really needed.
If the machine is rack based (probably not, but just in case), you're going to be fighting an uphill battle to even have it in the same room as working people from about ten seconds after you first power it on.
If it's a tower machine, then it's just a PC and needs no additional cooling that your existing PCs don't already have. If it's a 'home brand' PC, just make sure the case has large, slow-spinning fans and the machine's various vents aren't right next to solid objects that will obstruct airflow out of the case. You might also want to make sure the intake fans/vents have some dust filters.
Also, make sure you're using RAID (with either a hot spare or replacement drive *on hand*) and backing up regularly. Outside of extraordinary circumstances a hard disk will be the first (and only) thing in the machine that dies, probably 12 - 18 months after you first power it up.
I say this all as an Australian who has looked after the same sort of IT infrastructure you're talking about in the same sort of climate. Indeed, my own home server has 12x7200rpm drives and dual 2.4Ghz Xeons in a large tower case with little more than 12cm fans blowing air directly over the drives and a single 12cm fan exhausting out the back - I keep an automated eye on it with various monitoring tools and even on a hot day like today (where it is 35), the drives are only sitting at 39 - 41 degrees.
The short version is that you're not going to have any heat-related problems with a single (or even several, if they're reasonably well spaced) tower-style machine in an already airconditioned room.
I've been running servers in my livingroom for years now. Your bigest problem is going to be dust in the fans and cooling fins of the heatsink. Make your server with positive air presure inside to keep the dust bunnies out of the CD/Floppy/USB and Other holes. Use a big filter on the intake fans and change it on a regular basis. I use store bought A/C filters and cut then to fit my cans fan intakes. You can make a bracket to hold the filters or just duct tape them to the case.
Use GOOD FANS(dual ball bearings) AND HEAT SINKS! If you don't know whats good then readup on heatsink design. Don't be fooled by fancy cooling systems. Heat disapation is not a fancy problem. Basic rule is bigger is better. Water cooling is NOT required! It will just leak and make things hard to repair and bring up the cost.
Hard drive fans in the case are a must. Drives get very hot under server system loads. Space you harddrives 1/2 inch apart and blow the fan air thru them. I use a case with 5 CD bays and mount the drives there. Then I put a 12cm fan where the CD cover face plates would have been. Cut and stuff a little hard foam in the space around the fans to seal the case. This configuration leaves room for just one CD/RW drive for backups.
Oh and I've never had a 12cm fan fail; even with the added drag of the filter.
Use a closet to put your server in. Drill 4 or more 4 inch holes in the top of the door and cut a 10x15 inch rectangle in the bottom. Put four 40mm fans blowing out in the top and easy flow filter across the bottom. Change this filter every six months or more as needed. Waaalla! Server closet.
Don't use a window A/C for your closet! You will have condensation problems on your servers! If you must use A/C's to cool; then put the A/C in the window in the room the closet is in. Duct tape the switch on or super glue it. Put a big sign on it that tells of the last person that turned it off and how he's now flipping burgers at Mc Donalds!
With a little thought and crafting work you can have very reliable servers made with (as my friend put it) "junk computer parts."
Good luck...
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I live in Brisbane, Australia - it can get a bit warm here in Summer. During the summer of 2004, on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of Feburary, it sustained at 41 and 42 degrees centigrade on those 2 days respectively. Don't ask why I remember the dates - I just do. There were 2 PC's in the non air-conditioned part of the house. My brothers and mine. Mine was higher spec'd with more HDD's and "a single case fan". His had no case fan. His would freeze after running for 30 minutes when the temperature in the room was over about 38 degrees centigrade. Mine worked fine. Air-flow is the key.
I think the best thing to be done is to purcahse a half height rack - with at least one, possibly 2 shelves in it - and place the server/s in that. Make sure the AC is left on and that there is adequate air-flow through the rack and the noise should be OK - as long as the server in question isn't an Enterprise level device. If it is a full rack mount monster - with multiple high speed fans and 15 000 rpm HDD's - then you actually are going to need a dedicated space with dedicated cooling - and some sound proofing.
Just a note on closets - in Australia these are a relatively new idea and are generally referred to as "Built-ins" or "Built in Wardrobes" - and are only really found in bedrooms. Other "closet" like cupboards in a house will be referred to as a "linen cupboard" or "extra storage" or just as a "cupboard". If the "ex-residential unit" referred to in the post is more than about 10 years old, it probably won't have any sort of "built-ins" at all - and if it does - it will proabably be a "linen cupboard" style "closet" with fairly closely spaced shelves from top to bottom. This would required some modification to retro-fit a server and some adequate cooling - thus possibly needing to be restored back to original condition if the property is rented.
Also - the speed of Nework links in Australia generally precludes off-site hosting for "most" systems/applications - a business grade ADSL link running at 1.5MBit/sec (seriously, this is the most you can get in most places that even have DSL) is about $120 a month with 40GB of data include - capped at $999 a month if you exceed the 40GB (5c per MB for excess data). Let's not even discuss a 2Mb/2Mb SHDSL service - they start at about $350 a month and go up rapidly for any decent data allowance - if you happen to be near the 200 or so phone exchanges in the country that have a DSLAM that can do this (or is turned on).