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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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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).
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.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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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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.