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Cost-Effective Server Room Air Conditioning?
at0mic26 writes "I am currently tasked with finding a cost effective solution to our 30+ degree Celsius server room. The only air conditioning currently provided is a single duct pipe from one of two air conditioner units. I was thinking of stealing air from the second air conditioning unit with some sheet metal work, but it likely will not be sufficient — and would not have tolerance for both AC units being offline for any amount of time. An ideal supplemental portable AC unit is what I am after, however I'm finding it cost prohibitive, with $600+ humidity controlled AC unit, plus 20 amp socket requirement, plus contract work to make a hole in the wall for outside drainage so that the unit does not flood the place. What sort of successful cheaper air conditioning solutions have you come up with?"
Silly Americans.
Move the room to Antarctica, turn off the heat.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
if you can't afford $600 to cool the room, you need to turn off your servers.
Dry ice.
Just imagine the theatrics.
Dry ice and a fan? Seriously though, there's not much you can do here. What is the cost to the business if hardware starts failing if it overheats? How does that compare with the total cost of installing another A/C unit?
just stick a boxfan in there.
I toured CIHost's Bedford TX datacenter a few years ago. I saw a boxfan blowing on a bunch of servers and a single power strip plugged into 4 or 5 of those servers that was stretched across to a wall outlet so that it was about 8" off the floor. Pefect to trip over nevermind the walmart quality parts.
tour was over after i saw that.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
There are no cheap A/C solutions. Portable home units lack the tonnage to adequate cool even a small bedroom, let alone a room full of fire-breathing servers. Industrial portables for 'spot' cooling, that have sufficient tonnage start in the low $10K rang and quickly move up. My suggestion is to get an A/C pro to do up the spec for you and then bid it out with guarantees and such in the RFP.
Sig this!
Never try and just make do with the cooling.
The cost of doing it right pales in comparison with not doing it right and something happening.
See subject. Don't just buy servers and think of the cooling problem later. Cooling is expensive, but it costs less if you install it at the same time you set up your facility.
Apologies - I realise this doesn't really answer your question but it's an experience you, or others can gain from this situation.
>> I am currently tasked with finding a cost effective solution to our 30+ degree celcius server room.
First, its "celsius" and not "celcius".
On track, you need to check the SEER rating. A rating of at least 15 is good and energy efficient. Many of the Carrier models have decent SEER ratings. We use it in our office (a telecom) and its a huge saving over the old A/C which had a 10 SEER rating.
slashdot rocks
If you posted more information you could get a reasonable answer.
How much space?
How much heat is the equipment giving off?
What is your budget?
At what temperature do you want to operate the room?
How quickly is the heat output of the equipment growing?
How much excess capacity do you need?
If you can't answer those questions you won't get a workable solution.
If the room averages a temperature of 86 degrees (sorry I'm american) and I wanted to get it cooler there are a lot of options, however what size room are we talking about and where is it located (room, ground floor, basement?) Lots of different options and choices depending on lots of variables that weren't in the post.
I'm not trying to be a dick, just wondering because cooling a room for a small business like the one I work in that houses all of 3 servers in a room a little larger than your average walk-in closet is a lot different than trying to cool a room with 100 rack mount servers lined up in rows.
A google search though brings up a lot of places like http://www.ptsdcs.com/ - might just be worthwhile to google for what you need.
Ave Molech Setting
Higher a hooker for your boss that gave you an impossible task. Because then he won't fire you when you are unable to come through here.
and do it right!
Cheaper A/C alternatives? Do nothing. Let the room overheat and replace all the computing hardware. So what if you're down for a week?
Or suck it up and foot the bill to do it right.
No sig for you!!
You can use standard window units - but the key is insulation - you have to have a very well insulated and sealed room. I built my own server room by adding two additional layers of insulation on to the existing sheetrock (styrofoam with a plastic vinyl 4x8 sheet paneling and then putting silicon on all the seams, then using window units (with a backup unit). I can keep the room at a constant 61 degrees F with two full height racks running with a 8000-12000 btu 220 window unit.
The best idea I've seen is to use enclosed racks, sealed with weatherstripping except for vents at the bottom, and put a duct in the top that leads to an exhaust fan on the roof. Now you're not trying to cool the hot air produced by the servers; you're removing the hot air produced by the servers. Cool air from the already-air-conditioned room will be sucked up through ventilation at the bottom of the rack to keep the servers cool. And since your existing AC doesn't have to cool all that hot air, it should be able to keep the room temperature down to 20C.
Note that this is a long-term solution in terms of lower energy costs. I have no idea what it would cost up front to implement.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Seriously, the coward shitteth you not. If you can't afford $600 to cool the room, then consolidate your services onto fewer machines and shut the others off, because they're obviously not making you enough money to be worth running.
If, on the other hand, your boss is a cheapskate then do something like I did before - moved the servers out to my desk and stuck a honking big fan at one side to blow air past them. It had the very big plus side of being obvious to everyone that we had to keep the servers cool, and reminded them every day that the alternative was buying some aircon.
A 20 amp socket, if you're in the US is required for all commercial buildings. You don't have to pay for that. But $600 and a hole in a wall is too much $$ for a server room? That's pretty crazy. One server probably costs more than that. What are you looking for, dry ice and a fan?
I don't respond to AC's.
You have less than $2500.00 in cost there. Cripes the Libert unit in the server room here cost me $15,000 to have complete. $600 is dirt cheap $2500 is dirt cheap for what you are looking at.
Even if you did the Half-arse way and put 4 window air conditioners in the wall you still need the electrician to run wires.
You'll still come out the same price.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Bite the bullet and get what you need right the first time, because the repair and replace if it isn't done correctly will make $1500 seem like a drop in the bucket...
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
I recommend taking a look at MovinCool (www.movincool.com) products.
Really I have been wondering if one of those big fans like I see on some restaurant kitchens would help our server room.
Suck the hot air out and draw cold air from the rest of the building in.
Honestly a better solution is to reduce the heat.
How many servers are you running? How many are old PIV class machines?
How many could you replace with say new low heat Intel or AMD based systems.
Have you looked at building a few BIG boxes with new CPUs and running Zen or VMWare on them. Cut the total number of servers down.
It maybe cheaper to get new more efficient servers than to upgrade the AC. Not to mention the down time you may have when they install the new AC.
You may want to look at making less heat before you spend money on better cooling.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
so we're asking slashdot for a bunch of stupid answers.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
from your budget, you clearly only have one server in play, so put it in a refrigerator.
Cut a hole in the door to let the cables in and seal around them with that expanding foam stuff in a spray can.
Sounds like that would max out your budget.
Nullius in verba
Don't use people coolers, those stand alone AC units are not designed for 24x7 operation. I have seen computer rooms fry when they have been used because when they fail they fail spectacularly!
Bight the bullet and install a proper unit. The first time your people cooler dies, it will cost you more than proper AC.
Let it be the way it is until servers fail and cause outages. When it hurts the business enough, you'll get the budget you need to do it right.
The temperature 30+ says nothing to me. If I know the area of your machine room, the total number of watts from your equipment, maybe I can be more specific. FYI, I have eliminated the drainage issue by installing a small 12V pump myself and getting the pipes to the nearest kitchen sink, so no drilling on external walls.
If you're talking about concern over $600 price points, then all is lost. It sounds like you don't have the money to provide proper A/C to a residential home much less a commercial server room. I suggest you look into co-locating your servers to a real data center and pay a monthly fee. You'll have lower up front costs and your PHB probably isn't smart enough to recognize the long-term implications.
Good luck.
Install Linux, problem solved.
What company do you work for that can afford multiple servers at 10k each, give or take, and a server room and then balks at the price of an air conditioner? I like the idea of letting it fail, then going to your boss with downtime costs and recovery costs (you do have a recovery plan?) Then mention that the $600 plus looks pretty good.
In your posting you talked about adding ducts to steal A/C from a second unit. To work decently you would need to not only add a new output duct 'run', but also a new return 'run' (that is, unless the 2 units share a network of return ducting).
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
...You can use standard window units
Maybe he has a F/OSS shop. Geeze!
What sort of sucessful cheaper air coniditoning solutions have you come up with?
You've already found the cheap option. Your best bet is to not skimp (unless you like cooking hardware, assuming a reasonable growth rate in computing power under your care) though some of the steps you can take (e.g. hot/cold aisles) are really just rearranging your existing kit and adding some sheet metal work. But that doesn't allow you to skimp on getting adequate cooling. (If you want to know what "adequate cooling" is, ask a real expert; the answer depends on lots of facts you've not revealed.)
Be aware that in large datacenters, the cost of keeping them cool will usually dominate. Really. Be prepared to be your A/C salesman's good customer...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Can't you have like, air blowing up from the bottom of the building, through the room, and then out the top? Like a PC case? Sure it doesn't have to go straight up obviously because the rain would get in. But if you have it go out the roof anyway out a chimney it would work. I guarantee it!!!
This may seem a bit odd but try the basement of the building. Basements are usually cooler then the upper floors.
Simply blow the cooler basement air into your server room.
The down side of this is moisture and the outside chance of CO poisoning.
See! Problem solved!
... and don't forget the waterfall.
I'm no expert, but according to our consultants if more than one aircon unit is serving the same area they will conflict and one or the other (or both) will be likely to fail. (This even applies to leaving a door open between two rooms that are served by different units.)
I've got to admit that I've never quite understood their explanations as to why this is, but FYI.
Move the servers to Iceland and get a window fan.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Seriously, you ask yourself how much your servers are worth, what it'd cost to replace them, or do without them, and then you can factor in how much you should spend on setting up your cooling. There are several ways to do that, but few of them are cheap, and if your systems are at all valuable, you shouldn't balk at spending thousands on your needs. Since it seems 600 dollars is too much for you, all I can suggest is looking at your ventilation, or possibly replacement of your existing systems with more energy-efficient ones.
Forget drainage, you need a hole in the wall to let out the hot air that the air conditioner produces as waste.
My buddy, who pulls six figures doing A/C installs and consulting (and earns every penny), discussed this with me a couple months ago. Basically, good A/C is as complicated as putting together a good database. There's air flow and direction and insulation and compression and all sorts of things you'd never even consider. You can get by without training, but you should expect it to fail, and badly.
Depending on the size and population of your server room, you might expect to need a couple of $10K cooler units on the roof. Call your local industrial-service A/C or ducting guys and get an estimate for your BTUs and target temperature. That cost will make your boss cry- but give him a list of what the equipment in the rack would cost to replace and he'll sign off on it.
You wouldn't want the A/C guy to design your db, your boss shouldn't expect you to put together a good A/C solution.
I think there's a basic unanswered question here that will determine which of the above types of solutions you aim for.
If you're trying to make the actual server room a more pleasant place to be, you really do need to look into additional A/C capacity, and that's just not gonna be cheap.
But if all you're trying to do is keep your servers from overheating, there may be other ways of doing this. It could involve dedicated A/C units, but needn't necessarily. Non-A/C options include installing fans (not Wal-Mart box fans, something more permanent; talk to a local HVAC contractor), opening windows, installing specialized vent ducts, etc.
Either way, you're probably going to want to get HVAC in there. Proper cooling for computers, especially servers, is something like proper insurance for driving a car: the question isn't whether you can afford it, it's whether you can afford not to have it.
Immerse your server room in Flourinet!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just leave it as it is. Yes everyone likes to put their professional demeanor on and make proper recommendations and use words like BTU and SEER, but everyone here has seen a bunch of servers jammed into a poorly ventilated closet work just fine. Computers have pretty high tolerances for heat, and usually the worst that happens is the computer will shut down if it gets really bad. I remember one place I worked had modems that got so hot you couldn't touch them; every once in a while they'd stop working because of it but you'd just sort of jostle them around and they'd cool off just fine and start working again.
Prices should start around 3 - 4 k installed.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Have you considered consolidating your servers?
Machines with low load could be consolidated into one, by virtualizing or config-fu. This is a good option if you've got lots of older single-core units.
If you have fewer machines belching heat, you need less energy to cool them.
You get what you pay for in terms of reliability, electicity consumption and power. I expect that server-room grade AC will be a bit more expensive than that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You should not consider trying to do this on the cheap. If you keep in mind the cost of early equipment failures, installing a real dedicated AC unit becomes less costly. Check out a Mini-Split unit. Some of them have very high efficiencies and they do not require any ducting, just two lines to transfer the coolant and a drain line to get rid of moisture and power of course.
There are several alternatives:
1. ask to see the service level agreement (SLA) that defines your servers' uptime, availability, data loss, security, etc. If he has none, then simply drop the subject - whatever you do is AOK
Assuming you do have a service level to respect and no money to spend, then
2. Get a few ceiling fans and hang them below the ceiling blowing up through missing tiles into the air space above the ceiling. Open the main door to let cool air from the rest of the office in. Barbed wire filling the open door space will definitely qualify for security *see SLA above
3. Provide him with an estimate of costs and downtime to replace several servers because of overheating. Note to him that warranties don't necessarily apply either, if the machines are abused.
4. Start looking for a job where the management can see the light of day from where their routinely keep their head.
Please note, some of these options are tongue in cheek. Choose which ones ...
BIGGEST mistakes you can make on a server room is going cheap/unreliable cooling and power, you'll regret both when you have a room full of burned-up toasters.
The LG LWHD1200R I got for my girl in Fla is working fine. Got it from compactappliances.com delivered via UPS. No shipping or taxes, such a deal. Plugs into regular outlet.
No problems, just store "right side up" overnight to let the oil resettle if UPS didn't follow the sticker. And remove the manual and instructions before you run it.
OK, here's a way to approach the problem.
APC sells racks with integrated cooling. They have an online configurator program. Run the configurator, fill in your info, and you'll get a rack design.
Try changing the "watts per rack" number. Watch what happens as the configurator adds air conditioning units and fans. Note that as the power density goes up, the cost goes way up.
This is where they start to ask questions like "Do we really need a Web 2.0 web site?" Now you're starting to get the picture.
I'm not partticularly recommending APC. They just happen to have a useful online tool, one which can give you something to take to your bosses to give them a sense of the costs as you add more equipment to a rack.
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Steven Wright has a line about "I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier and put them together in a room to fight it out." That was what happened with our dual A/C system in the first computer room I helped build, back in the early 80s to support our VAXes. We had a couple of chilled-water Liebert units that were bigger than the computers, and management had decided to get two of them so we'd never lose cooling. Turned out we couldn't actually run them both at once, though I don't remember if they were fighting more about temperature or humidity - one unit would be pushing a bunch of cold dry air under the floor, which would blow into the sensors of the other unit, which would push a bunch of warm wet air under the floor, etc. And any time there was a power failure, the A/C wouldn't automatically restart, but the VAX would, so if this happened overnight or on a weekend, the room would reach 130 degrees (F), at which point the power system would decide their might be a fire and shut everything down until the room got cooler - which would take a while, since it wouldn't let us use the A/C. So we'd get in on Monday morning, have to open the back doors to the lab and go steal desk fans.
My late-90s lab had much smaller equipment - a bunch of routers and PCs in an enclosed office - but it still generated enough heat that we needed extra A/C. We didn't own the building, and the A/C unit that the landlord put in the ceiling would occasionally ice up and start dripping water onto our desk, but fortunately it usually missed the rack. For a couple of weeks during one of the A/C repairs, they gave us a big standalone thing that blew cool air into the room and warm air out through the ceiling ductwork. It had enough room in the top to chill a couple of bottles of wine, so our winetasting that month did whites.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the outside air is cold (winter, night, etc.) blowing it into the server room costs next to nothing.
Of course, if it's humid outside air, it may not be a good idea.
I have seen multiple server rooms full of systems ruined by A/C related failures (directly via overheating, indirectly by fires or sprinkler discharges after A/C failures).
Don't skimp!
Tell your employer to spend the money needed to get a proper A/C installation. "portable" units are ok - if they're professional grade, not home grade, and properly drained and wired and vent ducted. Permanent installation units are better, generally - cheaper for given tonnage of rating.
In either case, put in environmental monitoring ($400 or less) to send out alerts if it gets too hot or something else goes wrong.
IT folks tend to either not understand or not believe in the significance of getting facilities right. Experienced IT folks, with decades in the industry, know better. Take our advice - spend the money, get it right.
Figure out what your actual power is, what the UPS capacity is (remember, if the A/C isn't on UPS but the systems are, after a power failure the room will start heating up until the UPS is exhausted!). Definitely install monitoring (can be cheaper than any rackmount server is).
Distribute the servers in conspicuous places around the office, with your Bosses office as the home of the most loud and obnoxious machines.
This won't solve your cooling problem, but it might solve your budget issue if you don't get fired.
Looking at the cooling issue more broadly, here are a couple of resources that provide good information on techniques to optimize cooling on a budget:
The Hot Aisle: Great blog from Steve O'Donnell with practical ways to implement hot-aisle or cold-aisle containment and economizers.
Data Center Knowledge: Recent articles look at "roll your own" thermal monitoring solutions and using excess heat in swimming pools and greenhouses.
I once had to do essentially this in a slightly unusual situation: the server room was by an outside wall, and on the other side of the wall they were about to put in a new lawn. We just dug down extra deep (about 4 feet) and got about 100 feet of 6' diameter corrugated plastic drainpipe (intended to be buried, the corrugations make it somewhat flexible), covered it with dirt+lawn, and finally put a fan on one end and recirculated the server room air through this. Only had to buy a fan and the pipe, and the long-term power bills were almost zero (just the fan). And it's incredibly reliable.
So all told you are talking about $1,000 dollars for AC? Frankly that is a pretty cheap solution for datacenter cooling.
Seriously, I'm all for maximizing economic efficiency, but you can't cool for free.
"Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
There are some great options for minimizing the ongoing costs of cooling:
But any of those are going to take some investment. Remember, server acquisition cost is 1/3 of the total budget, the other 2/3 includes electricity and cooling, more than maintenance costs, on average.
Like others have said, virtualize, slow your CPU clocks, take unused disks offline, replace your power supplies, all good, but if your servers aren't worth $600 to cool (and therefor keep operational), how the heck do they justify your salary to run them? (hint: maybe they don't)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
i.e. several thousand servers. We only have to AC it for a few days a year (including probably today, since it's hot). Except on unusually hot days, we blow outside air through the building with fans and we have exhaust ports in the ceiling and roof for this purpose. This saves a huge amount of electricity over our old setup. I'm just a code geek so I haven't actually visited the data center yet, but maybe I'll take some pictures if I get there for some reason.
$600 won't get you an air conditioning unit suitable for any server room, let alone cover installation costs.
I'd suggest requesting a budget the is sufficient for the job at hand. You can't cut corners for a job like this, particularly if you actually value your data and uptime.
Possibly you could roof mount several units, and have a single heat exchanger for all of them. The holes required for the plumbing are actually not particularly large. The pipes to the heat exchanger can go through either the walls or ceiling, depending on the physical location of your room. It will probably cost more to have someone plumb the units than it will to have an electrician do the wiring. Hire professionals - they will do both.
I'd say that 20A is to low. 20A @ 240V is only ~4.8KW. You aren't going to get many servers in your room with only 20A.
Your room temperature is far to high. I'd remove the servers to alternate locations until you can control this. 18-20C should really be your target.
If you can afford a window, open it.
The outside air is probably cooler then the inside air... if it's not, tough luck, you can't afford anything else.
Your missing key information: wjat is the size of the server room. how many servers there is...
Honestly a small room a cheap 150$ 5K BTU unit will do the job, add a external temp sensor to computer that will page you when temp rise above X
Dig a hole, install pipe + water + pump, sink heat in to the ground. Ongoing costs = electricity to run a pump that only has to overcome fluid friction loss within the pipe. Cost variance over a year through different seasons = 0 since the ground in mostly a constant temp unlike an AC unit trying to sink heat to the air in the summer.
costs around 3-5kUS
knock out one of the walls and put in one of those movie hurricane fans that are like 10 feet tall and run on a v8 engine :D Then crank it up! It'll move air through that place so fast, the temp inside will be the temp outside! Now I'm from Wisconsin so that's rarely a problem but in like CA that'd be bad. But seriously, if $600 is out of your budget, you need to simply move the hot air out. Buy some ducting and install like a 12" fan in the ceiling (where the hot air goes) that blows down the duct and into the hallway or the closest large room. That's kinda what I do in my room at home cuz it goes up about 5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour of 3D gaming. So I blast it all out into the living room with a fan and it cools in back down to normal in about 3 minutes
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Just rent space in a colo facility with all the cooling/power/net. You can throw in monitoring, backups and failover. It'll be cheaper (up front, not over long haul) to rent a small space at a datacenter.
And as an added bonus: you'll sleep better.
Increase the airflow THROUGH the room by using an exhaust fan. Just vent it from near the ceiling to another space.
More airflow = more heat removed
I'm a small company - we have 8 Dell Servers in a 10 by 10 room. Its probably 80+ degrees there all the time - even hotter on weekends when the building turns the AC off or down. I've never had one hardware problem attributable to heat.
Step 1. Measure the output BTU from each server.
Step 2. Measure the BTU cooling capacity of the AC vent.
Step 3. Subtract the difference.
The difference is either excess cooling or heating, in your case I can guess it is excess heating, and what is heat, but energy, and energy = dollars.
Heat rises because it is more energetic. So the next thing you need to do is find the hottest spot on the ceiling and mark it with an X.
Now buy about 200 dollars worth of duct work and a duct fan and install it at this point. Vent the duct work outside and run it through a stirling heat engine mounted to a generator. The bigger the heat differential the better. Connect the generator to the power grid and cell back excess kilowatt hours generated by your server heat.
Take that money and buy a real AC unit.
A fan and an open door is about your only option with your budget..
My last job tried the cheep route for the test lab.. 20-30 servers in a 15x30 room hooked to a roof mount AC unit (don't know the tonage).. That stupid thing would break down every couple of months and couldn't keep up with the servers when it did work.
They tried some portable 1.5 ton units to suplement the roof unit but it was still always hot in there. 80-90f was the average
Then the portables started to break..
It all went to hell one weekend when everything failed and the room got up over 120f. The racks were to hot to touch and you could smell the servers cooking..
Only then the directors figured out that we couldn't complete testing on his pet projects because the lab was fried. Nobody listened before..
Then they wen't way way overkill and bought a 20 ton CRAC. The thing almost didn't hit through the door.
After that you didn't want to be in there without a heavy coat and a something heavy to keep your papers from blowing away (no joke!)
Bottom line.. cheep fixes will break sooner or later.. they are not designed for 365/24/7 operation at max capacity.. You need enough cooling to cool the room below the set temp and let the compressor cycle off for a bit.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Turn the servers off.
or explain to the powers that be what heat does to IT equipment, and what a complete failure could mean for their future and everyone's livelihood.
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
I have thought about this a lot... and there are some simple solutions.
1. When the air outside is cooler than the air in your computer room, bring air in from outside via the Air Conditioner. Why cool air when Mother Nature cools the air for you.
2. Combine the hot air from your servers into a duct. Have this go up to the roof. In most cases send the hot air outside. Why cool air that you have just heated.
3. Use natural cooling when possible. If you can just use the warm air for heating in the rest of the building things will be a heap cheaper to run all arount.
Darryl
Consider Amazon's EC2 service, or similar offerings from Sun, Google, etc. because it doesn't sound like you have the budget nor expertise to properly maintain a server room. If $600 sounds like a lot of money, then you have to ask yourself how much it would cost to have an a/c failure.
FFS, call an expert. If an engineer with a design firm wrote in and asked how to set up the company's servers, but he doesn't want to hire any IT people, everyone would be incensed at his stupidity for not calling in an expert. But somehow IT training makes people qualified HVAC design engineers?
Spend the money now, and only cry once.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Seriously, if the room isn't getting over 30C, you don't have to do anything. All commerical machines are rated to run at temperatures higher than that, and if you're concerned, clean the dust out of them every now and then!
It sounds to me that the energy required for the A/C would exceed the value of your 'servers' anyway :) .
Seriously though, I put in a commercial grade window unit. I had to cut a hole in a brick wall, second story (glad that we own lifts here) while the server room was operational.
I keep it set to 72F with a smart fan option, and it has been running 24/7 for 4 years now. It is cooling 12 machines in 2 racks, PBX and switches/routers plus all the UPSs. Positioned the hole in the wall so that it blows across the front of the racks. Nary a problem. The unit cost $800 from McMaster-Carr, and I spent a weekend installing it. I'm fortunate that I spent 25 years in the building/fabrication trades before moving to IT, and I don't have to have anyone's permission to do the right thing.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Seriously you can't afford AC for your Servers? And I wanted to get suggestions for a robot pigeon deterent for my pool...how was that worse? I jest...Kinda.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
The problem with the logical solution bringing in external air in great quantity is humidity and the climate in your area. The best solution to this I've seen is system that only kicks in to dehumidify external air, for example on a rainy day humidity surpassing 90% is not good for equipment. It's also the only time I've ever been cold in a server room at 12 C, outside was 5 C! Other than changing dust filters, on going costs were 1/5th of recirculating air con. Since a hot summer day is seldom above 25-30 C nor below about 10 C in winter in my area this was acceptable solution. Bringing in freezing air or very hot dry external air would require turning back on a heat pump air con system.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school, and that sounds like my server room. 12*20 feet, with one AC register on the ceiling T-tapped from ductwork that barely dribbled cool air down. The thermostat was in a classroom next door.
During the winter, I not only got heat ducted into the server room, but I also got a 1930s steam pipe over the ceiling grid helping out, keeping the server room around 30C.
I informed the school district's thoroughly incompetent construction director about the situation several times, and he did nothing.
In the meantime, another building on campus was renovated. Air handlers meant to go on the roof were hung from the ceiling inside, making the shop classroom prohibitively loud, and a pipe carrying 88C heating water burst over a computer lab in another room. Maybe I'm glad they didn't wind up sending that contractor to "fix" my HVAC problem. :-)
Figure out the cost of down time (parts, lost money, etc), VS the cost of properly cooling that room. Then sell it to management as a cost saving strategy.
The other thing you might want to do is get an HVAC engineer, or proper datacenter engineer in there and look at current air flow patterns.
If you have decent equipment, the spec sheet should include where and how it sucks the (supposedly cool) air in, and where the hot air is blown out. Arrange your hardware (servers, racks) so that you have "cold" and "hot" aisles, and make sure no A/C cold air can inadvertently get into a hot aisle without going through a server. So "cold" aisles should have the perforated tiles on the floor and a roof on top (at the height of your racks) and the "hot" aisles should have solid tiles and no roof.
Cold air should flow in from underneath the floor, enter the cold aisle through a perforated tile, get sucked through your machinery and is blown out into a hot aisle. Where it rises to the top of the room and is sucked out.
Oh, and the hot aisle should be hot. 30 degrees is no problem. As long as it is sucked out by the A/C unit, and not sucked back into some wrongly positioned machinery somewhere.
That's how you plan, build and cool a datacenter. But even if you have "servers" that are nothing more than desktop or deskside machines in the wrong location, then a few bits of plywood and some smart repositioning might go a long way.
I've been wondering if this is practical. I remember that some people have been building houses with dirt on top and non-south facing windows. Sort of like some of the hobbit houses pictured here: http://images.google.ca/images?q=hobbit%20house&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi - perhaps too whimsical an answer here.
The living conditions in these houses tends to not require AC to cool the house even in warm climates in warm/hot seasons. I don't know if this is practical, but in theory the building should be cooler to begin with.
I have been involved with cooling some small business "server closets" and have some observations and thoughts:
1) Is 86 degrees F out of bounds ? Are you having regular hardware failure now, that you think will be fixed by running cooler ? I know of various little closets around Austin in various small businesses that are packed with 4 to 8 servers (desktops running linux) that probably sit at over 90 or even 100 a lot of the time. I try to put the servers near the floor and disperse them as much as possible to avoid hot spots. Most of the failures I deal with I attribute to crappy hardware, and they happen on the desktops sitting in people's air conditioned offices just as often as they happen on the cast-off desktops sitting in the baking hot closet.
2) Those standalone AC units that have a water pan and exhaust the hot air through a dryer hose are crap from an efficiency point of view. Even if the hot air is exhausted out of the building instead of just loading the central AC, outside air will then be pulled into the building. Also, the water (as in most central AC units) is thrown out. These should be regarded as emergency use only, hot spots are really better taken care of my moving servers or even a wal-mart box fan blowing on them.
3) I believe (I plan to do actually tests with a kill-a-watt meter and thermometer) that the cheap, small window or wall unti airconditioners cool the most per watt. This is because there is no air exchange to the outside, and the condensate is allowed to run outside and then spattered over the condenser coil and re-evaporated. Even central AC units usually don't do that because the inside and outside coils are too far apart.
4) If you are marginally too hot -- which sounds like your situation -- you can probably best get what you need by cutting power consumption. Focus on the oldest servers first, and see if there are any disk servers that no longer used, backup servers that can be turned only when backups are happening, old hardware that has services that can moved to existing machines or virtualized onto existing machines, etc. There are some very low power boards out there now, that are probably faster than your oldest hardware. Look up that under-voltaged K8 writeup on Tom's hardware. You may find you have a bigger budget if you are speeding up the servers as well as lowering the temperature.
Also, I have chopped power consumption in some places by using laptops with a broken screen as a "server" for light tasks, such as a little used web site or a CVS server. Remember to keep on top of your backup situation when using possibly flaky hardware like that.
Good luck.
The hot air is expelled from the server cabinets, into the hot air ductwork, and out of the building.
Don't blow equipment heated air into the air-conditioned facility.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
You have a room full of computers and you can afford $600?? Something is wrong.
Is the room full of cheap desktop PCs? if that is the case then your problem is that you yu are using to much power. Replace and consolidate the servers
Back to the "can't afford $600 problem: have you figured out what it will cost per month to run your $600 AC unit? I'm thinking that you can burn up $600 of power in 90 days. If you were to replace those servers you'd save a bundle. Look into something like one of Sun's "cool threads" servers. Typically one of these can replace a rack of PCs It's a very low power 16 core machine.
In the mean time it ooks like you've found your low cost solution, only that you are not only paying to much for power now but the $600 AC unit will double your power bill. Best to cut power usage with low power servers. Every wat that the server burns takes more than one wat to cool with an AC unit.
They tried it, then after that, they ponied up and paid some contractors to do it right. Seriously, you can't skimp on this one, quit trying, it's a really, really bad idea. If you're tasked with it you need to get the best bid you can and submit a proposal arguing why it's a good idea to do it the right way. If you can't, turn the servers off, they clearly are not valuable.
Direct the output of your cooling units directly into the intakes of the servers, and exhaust the hot air coming out the back of them out of the server room, rather than letting it recirculate within the server room.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Lets setup water cooling!
Having worked in the sheet metal industry for several years, I can tell you that this is not something for the layman to 'research and implement'. You need professional advice my friend. You need someone to analyze the heat generated, floor area, and possible CFM output of a new, or additional a/c unit. Refrigeration tech requires many, and I mean *many* hours of training, and years of experience. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is get the air to circulate in your server room. In ours, we have a two pedestal fans that literally force the air in a circle. Since we did that, our a/c unit no longer ices up - which is an indication of the intake rad taking in too much cold air - it condenses and freezes. The intake needs WARM (circulated) air. Good luck - and hire someone who knows refrigeration. It's WELL worth your while, trust me.
.
Two layers of styrofoam on top of the existing sheetrock sounds like a fire waiting to happen.
Foam insulation is relatively hard to ignite but when ignited, it burns readily and emits a dense, black, smoke containing many toxic gases. The combustion characteristics of foam insulation products vary with the combustion temperatures, chemical formulation, and available air. Because of the dangers described above, foams used for construction require a covering as a fire barrier. One half-inch thick (1.27 cm) gypsum wallboard is one of the most common fire barriers. Foam and foam board insulation
All you have to do is swap 30 Farenheit for 30 Celsius and the problem will reconcile itself forthwith.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
If you live in a place like California with very low humidity on the very hottest days, then an evaporative cooler can do a good job and take a lot less power than a typical air conditioner. Note that here where I am, we are next to SF. While normally the humidity is high, on the hottest days the humidity plummets. So a unit with no compressor can blow a lot of fresh air (and evaporatively cooled air) into the building. We have an ADA70 unit on our roof for just the kind of cooling you describe:
http://www.essickair.com/eac/4_champ_ada70.htm
$600 is not enough to work with here.
Where I work, we have a smaller server room, maybe 100 square feet. Inside it we have two racks, one for network / phone gear, the other for our servers. Even with the small space provided, we spent the money to get the room it's own AC. It has it's own water line, backup power, and soon we'll be adding humidity monitors. Our installation didn't require a separate area for drainage, thankfully. All in all, it is worth the investment. I couldn't tell you what we paid, but I know it's well over $600.00 - and worth every penny.
It is better safe than sorry in this situation, because what happens if you pay $600 for a "solution" that doesn't work? Then you're risking your servers, your job security if something fails, wasting money, annnnd if you're lucky enough to still be employed, you'll end up having to get a bigger budget anyway. I'm sorry this doesn't help much in the way of ideas, but yeah, with that kind of budget I wouldn't know what to suggest. Though... Buying 50 fans or so might be kinda fun... Hehe.
One last note... If you can get the temp of your room down, you can go with a cheaper cooling solution. Virtualize some servers, save on power and temp! Keep in mind, depending on how many servers are virtualized, the cost to run ESX server could likely cost more than an initial investment on AC, haha. Software isn't cheap!
(Except for pirates, arrrrr.)
Trying to save a few bucks on this is not cost effective. You will eat it up in staff time and equipment breakage in short order. You don't want your servers running with 3% free space on the drives and CPU loads at 95%, and you don't want an AC unit in the server room that you have to think about. It's 105 F outside right now, and the server room is nice and cool. Your $600 plus labor is a cheap solution. Expect to pay about $3,000.00 to do it right.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If cost is a factor then maybe you should think about moving your servers to a pre-built data center so you do not have to worry about such things as cooling.
Depending where you are at most major cities have data centers that offer Co-Location.
Let the data center worry about cooling, power, and network. And you focus on your hardware and business.
I work for a company with location all over the US. I found a nice Data Center in Omaha, NE that hosts all my main servers for me. Go to google and search for cosentry.
I hope that helps.
I have an aircon unit being installed today to cool my 30oc+ DR site - a lot more complicated as the compressor has to be installed 3 floors down - cores being drilled tomorrow morning (saturday) = added$$$.
Anyway - it costs $AU7600ex (and all for a potentially off-line system).
The way I look at it - how much would it cost to replace the equipment and rebuild the data... worth more than $600?
Think the usual things... boiling batteries in the UPS, processor/psu etc fan fails etc. (see all of these)
What about the company insurance evaluator when they find out what you are doing.. you WILL get your yearly premiums increase (seen that too)
Oh yea.. and it might be 30oC where you sit - but how hot is it inside the UPS/CPU case? +50oC?? Pretty likely..
if you have a problem with getting $600 together you are not running a datacenter. We ended up spending between 10 and 20k on a bunch of Mr. Slim units and have been happy.
You can try and be cheap but when you are talking computing you have to have at least 1k to spend on a problem at any point in time. if you can't, get a fruit stand and do that.
Are you serious? Can't beleive this made slashdot.
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
The A/C units in a "real" data centre are about EUR 45,000 each (not including installation and maintenance), and a server room should have three.. two to actually do the work, and a third to activate if either of the others is down for either maintenance or due to a fault. $600 plus some electrical work is a *JOKE*.. just get it done & stop whining about it! Bitching about $600! Yikes!
if it's not possible to install enough exhaust fans to get the hot air outside or into the office area where the building aircond can deal with the heat then you are going to need an airconditoner and a good way to drain water away from the dehumidfying process.
With out knowing anything about your environment i go by a simple rule, for every watt of power you need about a watt of cooling.
check the power supply's on each device, server, router switch, ups etc etc and count up the watts, you can use Amps just find and online calclulater to convert. This will tell you the power of the system need to cool, split air cond used for a home will do about 2KW (kilowatts) a fully ducted system used in a house will do about 20kw. I am using house system for rough comparison only.
so now you have an idea of heat output, the 2 options I would use is either 2 cheap aircond units with each one capable of meeting the KW requirement, that way if one dies the other will keep everyting going and you can have cheap maintenance, or one good quality systen with high level of maintenance with extracter fans for back up. don't forget the extracted hot air and moisture has to go somewhere!
one thing to keep in mind, using the power supply info assumes running all systems at 100% untilisation, which unlikely but does give you worst case scenario, so if you know none of your server go over 50% cpu, for example, you reduce your required kw of cooling by about 25%.
i know there are proper formulas to calcuate exact KW/BTU/AMPS/WATTS etc etc, but when I am just trying to figure the best stragety the "it takes a Watt to cool a Watt" is a quick way to estimate what its going to take and draft up a plan.
Cheers
If you have any windows which receive direct sunlight and are plain glazing, be sure to install reflective film on the windows. It turned out that much of the heat in our server room was coming in the window, rather then from the servers. The semi transparent film lets most of the light in, so is still easy to work. It's just like a pair of sunglasses for the room :-)
It went from 2 full time air conditioners to only 1 easily doing the job.
sorry for the promo but I have to admit their work is outstanding.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
You should be asking, what's more cost effective: putting in an aircon unit for the server room, or replacing the equipment that is going to fail because your input air temp is 30C? Not to mention, when it does fail, it might take your last few hours/days data with it.
Seriously.
A couple thousand dollars should be enough to cover an air conditioner for a small business server room(which I assume you are since you're sweating $600).
Might want to consider consolidating servers as well. Look at the system CPU and memory utilization -- I bet you can consolidate a couple of machines into one box. This will reduce the heat being pumped into the room.
You need to purchase a 'Ductless Mini Split System', cooling only....no heat.
There are two parts to the system - just like the one in a typical house - but there is no duct work. You don't need duct work because you are cooling a single space.
The inside part typically mounts on the wall over the door, inside the IT room. The compressor mounts outside on the ground or on the roof. The inside part draws in air from the space and continuously cools it. Every commercial IT room I have seen has a similar setup. Now go to eBay.
of these comments are, "You are asking the wrong questions, and approaching the problem from entirely the wrong perspective"
Good-bye
Find a good dedicated server provider (i.e. Softlayer, Liquid Web) or a colocation facility. You would have an much easier time controlling costs, and would have time to get some real work done.
No data, no cry
Just hit the halon dump switch when you need to cool the room. Makes a hell of a noise, but cools the place down pretty nicely.
That's what I did at my last job, anyway. And the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that...
C-x C-s C-x k
I'm not an air conditioning expert, but is it really necessary to have it for the most part of the year? Why keep datacenters so cold? Most processors are rated for over 65 degrees celsius of operating temperature, most hard drives are rated at 55 degrees celsius or more. Wouldn't it be wise to design specifically for higher operating temperatures, and simply pump the air from the outside and release it through a giant chimney on the roof?
Take Apple iMac as an example of good thermal design. I took it apart and made some measurements and what I've discovered is that they won't even begin to cool the hard drive until it reaches 50 degrees celsius or so. I suspect it's even higher than that for the processor.
Compare this to a PCs geeks build by themselves - oversized power supply, biggest ass heatsink they can find so that the processor would run at room temperature. News flash folks, the processor can tolerate a lot more than room temperature without any adverse effects on performance or reliability. In fact, some mobile Intel processors can boil water and still work fine. Hard drives don't need room temperature either. In hardware world, if the manufacturer says the part works at 55 degrees, it fucking better work at 55 degrees, or someone will sue their ass. As the temperature increases, too, the thermal gradient gets steeper, so much smaller heatsinks are needed to transfer the heat away.
I do understand that it would be somewhat uncomfortable if data centers operated at 40 degrees celsius air temperature, but that could be solved with individual air conditioner jackets for the personnel or something.
It wouldn't hurt if hard drive manufacturers worked in the direction of raising their products' operating temperature, too.
It cost us about $2500 for a refurbished 1.5 ton recirc unit in the ceiling adjacent to our 60 sqft server room (not above it). I had done some calculations to determine that it should be enough cooling to handle 3.5 racks of our 1U whiteboxes running a full tilt. You'd want to put it adjacent because they are full of water and past experiences of server-waterfalls have taught me not to have servers under AC units. :)
However, stop now. Don't do that. What we learned is that to do it right, you need a lot more than just some AC units. You need reliable power, internet, chillers, maintenance staff and building management. You need to be able to get an AC contractor that will be able to be on-call and respond to you within a few hours, even in the middle of the night or on the weekend. When it freezes up (they do it from time to time) and stops heating you have a situation to deal with and must implement emergency cooling measures until they arrive. Always a fun day. And that power and AC in an older (80's era) office building are not designed for mission critical support of high density servers. Room would get hot almost every weekend as the building owners conserved AC by turning off the chillers. Maintenance staff and building owners had no concepts of how to deal with our 'internet company' needs. Don't forget worrying about physical security too, don't want a rogue employee or maintenance staff getting into the server room and doing god knows what (plugging a vacuum/Flavia/heater into the wrong power outlet and blowing the circuit).
So we moved it all to a cage at a local datacenter and haven't looked back. Much better situation and a lot cheaper & easier.
"E Pluribus Unix"
I have an example of what not too do.
Don't just go buy a standard window air conditioner unit, cut a whole in the wall, mount it, and turn it on full blast. Also be sure not to mount it directly over your main UPS. An ISP I worked for in the past did just this.
Window air conditioners are not designed for a 100% duty cycle. Over time, condensation built up on the inner coils, and FROZE into ice. At some point the air conditioner recognized that it needed to defrost itself, and shut off. The ice melted, forming water that dripped straight down onto our UPS, shorting it out, and taking down our core router, web, DNS, and email servers. (Yes, it was a small ISP, we had one of each.)
http://www.tradeget.com/free_list/p30493/index.html
first, calculate your dissipation - get a power meter and measure the draw of your hardware at the wall. 1 kW = 3412 BTU; 1 ton = 12000 BTU; 1 ton = 3.517 kW. if your AC isn't big enough for your dissipation, no amount of sheet metal will help.
if you have enough cooling capacity, then your problem is that you're not segregating your hot and cold air properly. all commodity servers are designed for hot/cold aisles - that is, the front of the rack needs to be pure cold air supply from the chillers. hot air needs to be kept from reaching the front-of-rack. blanking panels avoid wasting cold air by flowing through the rack.
You can drop temperature a lot by doing a few things:
1 - see if your equipment supports low-power modes.
HP Proliants have 3 levels of power. Full, dynamic, and low. Also consider consolidating physical servers into virtual machines.
2 - Remove obstructions. Anything that interrupts air supply or return is going to cost you.
3 - Re-route your supply and return ducting. You want supply to dump in front of your servers and the return to pull that hot air out.
Its going to cost you more than $600, but a ductless split system is a popular solution for server room cooling. Mitsubishi's mr slim line is very popular for this, just have to make sure its installed properly so the air isnt boucing off the server racks making it short cycle.
Perhaps one could install water cooling on the server(s) but instead of having it lead to a radiator in the case have it hang out of the window.
Maybe you could even just use water from the tap and send it back down the drain if you are unmetered.
All the solutions thus far indicate "staying the course". Just stop being a datacenter - whatever you are running can easily be hosted somewhere else - stop worrying about it, and move your code somewhere else - there are PLENTY of people that will host you. Otherwise you are playing with numbers that are really not worthy of being talked about.
We're running 3 Soleus 14kBTU units to pump heat out of our 16 servers + switches + ...
Yes, it's a toy [cooling system|network|server room], yes it's the wrong way to do it.
We got a bigger improvement from putting a box-fan blowing downward on the top of one of the racks to circulate the air more aggressively than from adding the third Soleus.
There is strong talk of dumping the hot air into the offices of some of those reptilian types who run space heaters in the summer and reclaiming some of the waste heat.
Exhausting waste heat has merit and is highly effective.
just stick a boxfan in there.
That's what google does, although, if you look, you can see they use a round fan.
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/content/binary/JeffDean_Google2000.jpg
Assuming you have a computer "room" (enclosed space)....
Supplies (plus tools):
Duct tape (you have it somewhere in your desk)
Some 2x4 wood (get it from a dumpster or construction site)
New circuit breaker (take it from another unused circuit)
Cheap 25000 BTU window AC unit ($600)
1) Convert your 20A circuit from 120V to 240V, or move to Europe, or get a smaller AC unit.
2) Cut a hole in you computer room to the outside. This could be a hole to the real outdoors or just into another room. You don't care because the computers are all you need to deal with for this project. If this hole happens to be into another room it will still work just fine as it will move heat from the inside of your computer room to the outside (into your office or where ever).
3) Use the 2x4 wood to build a support for the window AC unit in your new hole. You don't want it falling out, then you'll just have a hole in the wall (another cheap cooling idea).
4) Install the cheap window AC unit into the hole and seal with the duct tape. Plug it into the outlet and turn it on.
5) Profit!...I mean, you're done. If you need redundancy then repeat the procedure for a second unit (assuming you have the power, or a long extension cord).
This is not a joke...I have seen this setup in a few places (eg. basement computer room), it's a crude setup but the computer room is cool.
Note, if the AC unit happens to be next to your office cubicle then you might want to move first. Don't forget to put a large trash can under the back of the AC unit as it will drip condensate all day. Also in the winter, please don't walk on a the rug in your computer room as you will build up a big static charge because your humidity (RH) will be about 0-5%.
For about $600 you can get a 25000 BTU window unit. With that you can cool about 7KW of computers. If you only have 120V then you can get a 15000 BTU unit for about $400 and cool about 4KW of computers. Don't forget to include the heat from your UPS (assuming you have one).
If you need better humidity control, put a big bucket of water in the room for the winter, and add a space heater for the summer (for reheat, you run both AC and heat).
Now if you made a mistake in your post and have a $6000 budget then you can get a ductless split system and have it installed (unless you are in a real office building and can't get outside access).
[...] and would not have tolerance for both AC units
Yeah, Anonymous Cowards get on my nerves, too.
Seriously now, in my experience portable air conditioning is a joke (noisy, inefficient, and they still need an exhaust duct for the hot air, of course). But I doubt you'll find any satisfactory solution for less than $600, unless you plan to build the AC unit yourself.
About a year ago we moved to a new building. The room designated for server room had no air-con so we were open to a number of options to keep it cool during Australian summers (and winters!). The room is fairly small - it will fit around two to three racks maximum. Currently we have one fully populated rack of equipment (mostly 1U servers).
We decided to try exhausting the air first (into the ceiling cavity) as the external air was reasonably cool. This actually worked pretty well. The room average temperature was between 24c-26c, and remained fairly constant. Worst case was 31c. Interestingly the room did not go above 35c when the fans were off for long periods of time, as it appeared that convention drew the heat out the exhaust fans. For the expected life of our equipment this temperature range was reasonable and surprisingly was much better than the previous 2x18Kwh cooling setup (floor was 18c, ceiling was 35c), however one thing we noticed is that there was significant turbulence in the room from the server fans and that it was mixing the hot and cold air around.
It also became clear that to keep the room around 24c with more servers going in was going to be a challenge, and that during winter (when the external air is typically heated), we would see a rise in the external air temperature.
As our winter approached, we decided to install a 8KWh split unit. It works really well, we now maintain the room at a constant 22c and could easily handle cooler temperatures if we desired. The exhaust fans are still in place and running. Interestingly they work well at removing the hot air so that we are not spending extra energy cooling it.
So, exhaust of hot air works for us in keeping the cooling costs down, and had the added bonus of avoiding very high temperatures when air-cons failed.
share space with someone who can afford AC. Virtualize services to reduce machines.
Dump a few gallons of water on your servers.
Oh, you wanted the servers to survive? That'll be $10000 per server.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
If you buy a small portable units used, you can find them in your budget. As for the water, a small pump attached to tubing can be used to pump out the sump on the device. Even new ones can be had at 10K BTU for much less than $600.
Maxwells' Demon.
When that fails, call your friendly neighborhood AC salesman and tell him the data center has some problems.
You can spend money now or spend money right now.
There is NO solution to make up for unplanned growth (except to end it.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You might get better mileage out of improving airflow through your rack rather than beefing up your HVAC. You want to focus on removing heat rather than directing cool air into your racks.
Look at racks (such as Chatsworth CPI) that have options for heat ducts that evacuate hot air from hot spots (it typically means a vented front door and a solid rear door, and yes, you have to dress your cables so you can actually close them!). You could exhaust the hot air elsewhere outside, as long as you have a clean filtered intake. But even if you just return the hot air to the HVAC intake, the existing AC should operate more efficiently.
Anyway this should be much more cost effective than doing a raised floor with AC vents, trying to force the cool air to rise.
then, unless you live in florida or the tropics, those portable jobs aren't that much of a pain. I managed to get one the size of a minifridge after a real AC unit lost out to a new p520. I've only 1 full rack, so I don't really need that much, but I didn't want the hardware taking up my limited space and I imagine it won't last for more than a few years with a 90%+ duty cycle in the summer.
It came with a built-in water tank, maybe 2 liters or so, and I have to empty it about once a week. If it had been more frequently than that, I could've just ran the outflow hose to a 10 gallon bucket or something.
BTW, what kind of server room are you in that doesn't have a 20 amp socket? One where $600 is pricy I suppose...
If you effectively duct the heat pushed out by the rack units to the outside, your requirement to cool down the hot exhausted air in the room diminishes quite a lot.
Ok, not usually possible with computers, but I used to do that for racks of audio power amplifiers used in a permanent install. They drew air in from the front of the racks and blew out the back which was fanned outside, thus the room didn't require much to keep it cool.
-=[ place
Consolidate the servers. Put the servers inside the adjusted breakroom fridge.
I had 16 servers at one time, and consumer air conditioning units could not keep it cool even in the winter.
then I spent $100 on a 1200 cfm "attic" fan, and it dropped the room temperature by 10 degrees, and it doesn't run constantly. I don't use air conditioning anymore.
Random server temp spec:
IBM 9406-570 (AS400)
Recommended operating temperature
5 degrees to 35 degrees C (41 degrees to 95 degrees F)
So, do you NEED to cool?
Find out the hardware specs. If you're within the specs, then its cool enough.
I'm assuming that since this is a server room, there's rarely any people in there.
Also, one of the best ways to make a place cool is to add less heat!
As others have said, it could be that replacing hardware is a better solution than adding cooling.
New Intel core based hardware or AMD gear is much cooler for the same performance than a lot of older gear (especially P4 based gear)
You get better performace, and your power bills go down not up. (Newer, cooler boxes will use less power to run, and you won't have the added load of new cooling)
At my company, our CFO refused to take action on our repeated requests for a new AC. The AC we had (an overrated, under performing heat pump) was fine for when the office first opened up with 10 servers. Triple the server count and add in a few disk shelves and you can see the cooling needs drastically changed. Eventually the unit was always running and it would just randomly pop a fuse, resulting in a server room that over heat (120F on the floor!) The easiest solution to the issue was to start shutting down his accounting servers a few times a week blaming the heat. After the third "thermal shutdown" week, we had a contractor quote us for a rush job and had it installed a week later. It cost 20k (5k more because of the rush order), but its been a COLD 60F ever since:) All in all, the poeple in charge dont care until it effects them.
While the comments about Antarctica were obnoxious... they weren't too far off base. Move your servers. I was talking with one of our data providers about doubling our bandwidth to our colo, and if I could move some of my servers down there, I would break even on electricity to power the servers alone.... not to mention lower cooling requirements. You get them moved into a state of the art facility, and you don't have to have ridiculous pricing.
Depending on your situation, it may or may not work.
Another alternative is removing some of the servers from that room and put them somewhere else in the building. Put them somewhere where they won't overheat.... then you reduce the load on the existing room.
You have to ask the following questions when designing a cooling system for an HVAC system for a server room. The conditions are significantly different than cooling for an office.
1. What is your total kW consumed in the room.
2. What is the cooling strategy you want to employ?
Passive cooling - use a fan to dump the heat out of the building.
Active cooling - Install an air conditioner with an external condensing unit to dump the heat outside.
Alternate cooling - Dump the heat into the rest of the building during winter in order to saving on heating costs.
Any of these options have good and bad points: expense, humidity control, thermostat control, expense of use, required backups.
3. How is your server room arranged?
Is everything just thrown in the room?
Are you running a hot isle/cold isle environment?
Do you have a raised server floor so you can pump cold air into the bottom of the racks with a ceiling return?
Do the racks have fans to draw air from front to back?
4. What is your current cooling capacity that is dedicated to that room?
The last server room I designed was 500 square feet and consumed roughly 14 kw (28 watts/sf). That is roughly 4 tons of sensible cooling. To purchase a system capable of 4 tons of sensible cooling you will need to purchase a system capable of 5-6 tons of total cooling (Skipping the lecture on Sensible vs Latent vs Total cooling). So have you have just spent $4,000 in materials. Assume your costs will double for installation. Plus another couple of grand to have an actual engineer come in and design a system that will serve your specific needs.
The question is not one of getting the heat off the chips. The heat is making its way into the air just fine. You need to get the heat out of the air (and the room) and out of the building. If your room is exceeding 30C I would assume your racks are easily running 5-10 degrees hotter. That is getting into the range where your equipment is going to start shutting down.
Now onto your problem: $600 budget. Option: Throw a patch of your choice at it. A roll-a-way unit from Wal-mart or target where you can push a heat rejection duct out of the building, for example. This is a patch, not a solution.
Assume you are going to have to pony up $10,000 (USD) to solve this problem.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I have a portable unit, brand is NOMA (found in most hardware stores in Canada). Paid around 500$. What is great is there is no bucket to empty, the humidity is kinda vaporized and pushed out the heat exhaust (no dripping). It's been running steady at "Low Speed" for the last 4 months or so, and it keeps a 250 sq/f room with two full racks and two huge monitors around 23 Celsius. I simply taped the exhaust to the existing air duct (yeah, using duct tape on duct!), there is no water drip.
I like this model because the room is cool and there is no humidity. It is portable but it's big, like those mini-fridge in hotel rooms.
lucm, indeed.
I once had the Air Conditioner go out.
In phoenix.
In July.
I took a turkey out of the freezer and stuck it in front of a massive fan. I also took a bunch of empty beet bottles from around the house and filled them with cold water.
It didn't really work, but it was really funny!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
If $600 - $1000 is too large of a budget for your project, then you should just shut your server room down, as you aren't making enough money from having a server room.
Seriously, relocate your servers to colocated hosting, or pay up for the requisite climate controls. Beyond that...fuck off.
Someone else said it nicer in another post.
Bring back Sirius Punk!
Well, I'm about to embark on a course where I learn how to exactly model the airflow in server rooms. I thought this would be usefull for cases like yours, to be able to evaluate possible alternative setups and improvements to the configuration of your racks, ventilation ducts and airco's. This in turn is part of my switch to green IT consultancy. I still need a demo case for the course, so if this is interesting let me know. Cheers, and don't sweat it ;-)
He already balked at $600 folks. His problem isn't finding the right cooling solution, it's getting the proper funding and support from management for what he needs to properly cool the equipment.
People in his org aren't having the right conversations. They're not willing to spend $600 to save multiple thousands in fried gear?
at0mic26 you need to have the proper conversation with your higher ups.
True, but it's not a dedicated 20A socket. It's a 20A LINE with several 20A sockets on it. Large capacity (over 9k BTU) A/C "window units" use significant power, to the point they pretty much need to be on their own circuit.
I once made a cooling system for a small server room that used tap water. I don't want to recommend this though, because running significant amounts of water through a server room is generally a bad idea :)
I got some aluminium sheet bent to a duct shape, so that it ran from about 20 cm from the ceiling to about 50 cm above the floor. Inside the duct i placed several of the larger type radiators that are used when cooling overclocked computers with water. At the end of the duct I placed 3 20mm fans that would pull air through from the ceiling down through the radiators and out at the bottom. A thermostat stopped the fans and waterflow (magnetic valve) when the temperature was low enough. Radiators were connected in serial, so that the coolest water was closest to the fans.
This server room was inside an industrial area where water was abundant and free of charge, so water came right from the pipes, ran through the radiators in the duct, and then right down the drain after cooling the air.
CONS: Not a very efficient setup, requires some DIY work, and you risk flooding your server room.
PROS: In this case it was cheap, and we had no accidents ;)
I wonder if I'm talking out of my ass here (it's 3am right now), but instead of cooling it with more A/C, perhaps you could find a way to pump out the heat instead and channel it back into the building.
Not only would this save money from less heating bills (in the long run, anyways), but you would need to spend less energy (hence $$$) to cool the room down.
Either this is an ingenious idea, or a sign I need to go back to sleep. :-P
Its your COMMS ROOM with hundreds of thousands of (your choice of currency unit) located there.
Plus the business inconvenience of having the equipment fail and you having to resolve that / invoke your BC/DR program.
Should you really be mucking around trying to save money on the Aircon / Drainage?
Get hold of a reputable company who knows about computer room air-con, get them to give you some cost scaled options and put those on the table alongside the cost of the business being down for a week.
--- This meme is memory intensive
...the servers died
Seriously - if you're the IT-guy (administrator or whatever) why is it your task? Is it also your task to run new power lines and add in new fuse boxes to keep the servers running?
Now, if you're the building supervisor then it's an entirely different thing, but other than that, how is it your task?
If I'm the guy that does most of the driving in the company cars (salesman or whatever), is it my task to arrange for a new parking structure, just because the old one is now flooded? No.
Call up five or ten contractors that deal in these sorts of things and have them give you an offer (maybe including a minimum need and a future need offer). Give those offers to your boss or the bean counters and let him/them decide what to buy. Shouldn't take more than an hours work one day (finding and calling contractors) and then something like 10 to 20 minutes per contractor to show them around.
Delegate, delegate, delegate!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The tuning of the algo is not all that easy, but it divided the electricity bill by 3 overnight !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
very low budget solution:
first consider this. an aircon is used because you need to cool the servers "enough".
enough = cold air + circulating air.
but...
enough = warmer air + faster circulation
so...
cheaperst solution is to have faster fans to circulate more air quicker over the cpu / ram / power-sup.
if you have a tower, fit a fan in the side blowing directly onto the motherboard/cpu/ram.
ir you have rack servers, move them apart so that they are 3-4cm apart. cut a hole in the top and fit a slim fan blowing downwards into the server.
-what im trying to say is:
if cpu = 70degrees celcius, you need a standard cpu / case fans to cool server inside with cold air (20degrees celcius). so mild fans and cold air to cool is enough.
you could cool the same cpu with warmer room temp air:
but, YOU NEED TO MOVE MORE AIR FASTER TO GET RID OF THE SAME AMOUNT OF HEAT, THAT THE COOLER AIR AND STANDARD FANS DID.
hope this helps.
It got fixed pretty quickly after that.
You might also point out that $600 saved on aircon will probably equal $1200 or much more in early component failure and downtime. When it's 30 in the server room, it's much hotter inside the server.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
If your servers are operating at more than 25C on a regular basis then chances are you are seeing high rates of disk drive failure and other component based failures. I can't imagine the downtime, cost of replacement parts and effort to fix would be cheaper than spending the $600.
We had an AC outage for just 1/2 an hour on about 12 racks. Over the nexct 3 months lots of random disk failures cropped up in that area.
Electricity is expensive, therefore simply turning the electricity into heat and dumping it into the atmosphere is also expensive.
=> Do something else with it.
Deleted
Tell management that all employees must get extra ice in their beverages at lunch and bring it back to go into a bucket in the machine room.
'Cause that's the absurd level of penny-pinching you're looking at here.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
but we ran 3 mitsubishi mr slim air conditioners ceiling mount.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Keep putting a large ice cube in the middle of the server room.
In terms of cooling, the most cost-effective thing is the proverbial Big Fat Heat Sink, and the second-most cost-effective is fans. Actual air conditioning is not a cheap thing, especially when the room has a bunch of heat-generating devices (like, e.g., servers) in it.
So the question becomes: where is this building located, and what does the ambient outdoor temperature run to?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
http://www.gmilburn.ca/ac/
One major consideration that I didn't see addressed anywhere is the hot air return. You won't get very far just pumping air into the room if there's not an efficient way to get the hot air out. Major mistake that is often made. AC is a closed loop system. Its removing heat from the air it sucks into its return ducting. If the really hot air you're worried about isn't headed into its return ducting you'll get some minor benefit from it, but you'll do FAR better to direct the heated air TO the air conditioner.
Just my 2 cents as a mechanical engineer.
My Babylon
If you think your building AC is up to the load over all, have you considered better ventilation from the ambient air outside the room. Faster turn over of air can go a long way in cooling. Though it's doubtful you'll be able to high turnover of ambient office space air to bring your server room down to 20C, I'll bet you can make a dent in the current 30+C level. This might even be possible without making your co-workers too uncomfortable by maknig sure that the exhaust air is discharged into the return air plenum, which is usually the space above the drop ceiling.
All that fan power and ventilation might however increase the noise level near the server room.
If you're going to go the cheap route without having someone come onsite and consulting, I'd get a couple of the window mounted air conditioners that go for between $100 and $200 and a couple of dehumidifiers (which you'd have to empty regularly or hook up to a drain).
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
$600 is not much for a business that has a server room, so it sounds as if the manager does not know what the servers or information on them is worth (or maybe he does??). At one large company, I got a agreement to turn off our workstations when the temperature in a room got over 95F based on the equipment specifications (Operating conditions for them under 100F). The day I turned them off, the manager was upset, came to the room and saw I was not kidding about the temperature, he got a temporary fix in by the next day (had a hole cut in another AC duct running in the false ceiling above) and within weeks an AC system for the room was installed. He knew what the lack of access to the machines was worth and now knew what a 95F room was like.
You're looking at about $1500 to add a portable AC to a room. That's about right. I'm guessing if you need supplemental air conditioning, you have around $100,000 worth of gear sitting in said room. Do you really want to cheap out on this? If the cheaped-out AC (if you're not sacrificing amount of cooling, you're sacrificing reliability) fails and burns up your gear, was the savings really worth it?
If this seems high to you; you can often add a 1-ton HVAC for about $5000-$8000 providing you have space on the breaker panels. That's a much better permanent solution.
This is one of the (many) reasons that people often end up colocating mission-critical gear. It costs you more to build your own server room than host it in a tier 4 datacenter for 3 years.
Most of the answers I see here are not very helpful. We have a situation where we are in a multi-year lease and grew more than anticipated. Our server room is an inside room on the second floor of the 3 floor building. We are in a hot and humid climate. And lately, the landlord has started turning off the AC nights and weekends.
Originally, we had additional cooling with a single Edgestar AC unit. This is a pretty good unit; does not produce water we have to get rid of and we pump the waste heat into the plenum. The only downside was that it doesn't handle power outages well; the electronic controls have no battery backup.
Recently, we found the single unit could not handle the load so we added a second unit. This second unit is a disaster. Like the first unit, it doesn't produce water; however, it only operates at temperatures below 85 degrees. And this is by design! Above 85 degrees, it just blows air.
I have no idea what we paid for the units.
for a company that had a very small server room (like 5 machines). It was basically a closet with a slim style air conditioner in it. It kept the room quite cool. It was similar to a Mr. Slim. I have a hunch it will cost more than $800 though.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
ductwork booster fans will circulate the cool air into the room even when the main a/c system is turned off. I suggest 2 of them one from each a/c system you referenced. $100 worth of 5" flex duct from home depot and 2 extension cords
For my customers, I put a temperature controlled fan in the server room. Cut a secure ventilation vent in the server room door (near the floor) and installed the fan (blowing out) near the ceiling. Put a temperature sensor (around 25C) to turn on. This should cost you max about 150USD.
Just thought I'd share a story (do not know if it's true, but it sure is a good story) about the computer enthusiasts' club at my University union.
They raided an old abandoned building set for demolition, scrounging all the water radiators from the rooms. They arranged these in a grid covering the floor of their server room, interconnecting them with some sort of hoses or tubes. They then covered the grid with a latticework of wooden boards and put the servers on top of the boards. Finally, they connected one of the end tubes to a water tap and stuck the other one down a floor drain. A turn on the tap and they had passive water cooling in the entire room.
Now, the university must have suspected they had a "leak" somewhere, but since they only had one water meter for the entire campus and since the throughput in that tap wasn't so big they never caught on until the club relocated.
Of course, I won't suggest wasting water like this, but a similar setup only with a pump and some kind of external heat exchange would probably not be too hard to set up. Some others in the thread had a couple of ideas...
I highly recommend against portable "evaporative" air conditioners that claim they don't need drainage. They're lying.
It's more likely that there's something faulty in your installation, or some strange circumstance that's making them not work properly.
We have a very small server room (really a large closet), and only about seven machines plus a couple of 3000VA UPS's in the room. We've been cooling it for four years now with a Haier portable A/C unit (yes, a cheap Chinese unit bought from Walmart.com) which evaporates the condensate and exhausts it via a short duct through the wall into the next room.
There have been zero problems so far, and as a side benefit our lunch room stays nice and warm in winter. I have replaced the unit once, after three years of continuous operation just as a preventative measure (there was nothing wrong with it and it's still working at my in-laws' house). They cost under $300. We have to wash out the air filters about twice a year, otherwise the reduced airflow will make the evaporator freeze up solid, but that's the only maintenance it requires, and that's just a quick rinse of the filters in a sink.
Putting moderation advice in your
Just had to add a comment to this one - which is at a tangent to the general discussion so I apologise.
You weren't outsourced because you annoyed your bosses by stacking boxes in the corridor. The writing was very clearly on the wall from the moment you were moved to a building that had no provision for your service.
Far from neglecting to account for your needs, you were scratched out of the grand plan months before you knew anything about it. It does, after all, take a little while to arrange an outsourcing deal. I should know.
Seen in this light, had you wanted to hold on to some sort of job you were probably best off working twice as hard following the move. Rather than stacking oldware in the hallways.
This sounds very critical of you and I'm sorry, it's not supposed to come over that way. After 7 years it must be very difficult to realise that your employer could literally not care any less about you. But at least you've learned that lesson now so you're ahead.
GP.
I can't believe the number of replies that tell this guy he's out of his mind asking this question with a $600 figure in it. Not every IT shop in the world is a large shop. Heck, there are loads of places that don't even have a clue what they've invested in IT, since they cobbled it together over a period of years.
I just joined a midsized manufacturing firm because they want me to establish an IT department. They realized that they needed someone to deal with the technology who knows how to look at it long-term, but that doesn't mean that they can fund everything that needs to be done right away. If I were this guy (and I am, in some ways--see below), I would do whatever you can right now for $600, and let management know that it is only a bandaid. They need to be made to understand that not funding a proper solution is likely to cost them big dollars in gear replacement and downtime. Let them know how long it will take to purchase and deploy replacement gear, and ask them to estimate how much money they will lose due to that downtime. What they would lose will likely be far more than you will need for any solution.
The place where I'm working doesn't have a dedicated server room. The twin racks are standing in the corner of a long high-wall office space that designed to house two employees. It's only indirectly air conditioned, and the gear throws off so much heat that you can feel it from three feet away. The fan noise is so loud that the office staff tend to close the door to the room (cutting off the air flow). They have the rack fans venting into the attic, but the attic has no outside vents (tin roof, no openings, because they had too many problems with leaks in the past), so the attic can only take on so much vented air. Much of it escapes back into the room, since the vent hood does not seal on top of the rack.
There are three 1U PowerEdge servers, a 48-port switch that is nearly maxed out, an 24 port switch for the servers, home runs, and a few key workstations, and a legacy switch of unknown use (it predates the guys who kept the network running before I got there, and nothing is labeled). There are also two mid-tower servers, two LCD displays (thankfully, no CRTs!), a KVM, and the requisite UPS units. They didn't mount all of the gear properly, so the three switches are basically stacked on the bottom shelf of one rack, and all of the 1U servers are right on top of each other, too. Segments of the network have gone down numerous times since I started, and most instances appear tied to heat.
No brainer, you say. Just have them build a proper enclosure, you say. I've been working that angle for three months. I have one officer who wants all the servers in the attic (where the ambient temperaturs is already around 35C/95F) where they have the telelcomm gear and our firewall (they warned me that the voicemail system needs to be rebooted periodically, especially on hot, sunny days). I have another officer who wants to relocate the whole lot into non-heated and non-cooled area of the building that shows signs of significant rodent traffic. I'm sure the servers would be just the kinds of vacation spot the mice would love. Their cash flows are significant, and they're even building a new shop and office addition, but they didn't plan for any IT expense in the process. I tried to get a single high-wall office in the new office space, but no dice.
Fortunately, my directly up-line has been willing to listen and is starting to understand how critical this issue is. We have an ERP program installed, and when the network goes down almost nothing can get done (apart from what was already in the pipeline). He's starting to realize that, though they are paying me good money, I'm losing most of my time to issues that would be non-issues if they front some money now. This thread came at a perfect time for me, since I'm stil trying to figure out what type of cooling system to pitch as part of my current proposal--one that is getting some traction--to build me a double
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Cost Effective.. As in, how much will the cost be if your server hardware takes a dump, and you have to put all new hardware in, restore from backup, and be losing money during the down time?
I work for a newspaper, one of the absolutely skinflintiest, most penny-pinching companies I've seen in my life. When they built the new building about 5 years ago, I asked them to include climate control for the server room. "We'll deal with that next year, it's not in the budget this year." was their reply. So, the server room, which at the time only had two rack-mounted servers and a Unix box inside, got up to about 80F routinely. I begged, pleaded, and pestered them until they actually did something. Chopped a hole in the wall, and stuck in an old window-mount, venting to the inside of the inserting/packaging/warehouse area. This was able to get the temperature down to about 70F, and hold it there. With the addition of two more servers, though, the temp got up to about 78-80F. And, this was in the winter. As soon as spring came around, the tempereatures started to climb, up to about 85-90F, and with the upcoming addition of four to six more servers, it was way too hot.
We took the plunge, and I was able to actually get them to install, as a Capital project, rather than regular expenses, a Mitsubishi Mr. Slim remote unit. Wall-mounted, with external condenser, etc...
This did require the running of a 220V circuit, but the cost was just under USD$10,000.00. Considering that there are nine servers in there, with a few more on the way, and each one costs about 5 grand, plus some software, and plus the downtime and such, it was VERY much worth the cost, especially since we'll be able to add more servers in the future and still have plenty of growth room. Plus, the servers and hard drives should last longer too, since their lifespan won't be affected by high temperatures. I'm able to keep it at about 63F right now, measured on the wall farthest away from the A/C unit, behind the servers. Just walking back there, you can feel a massive amount of heat being thrown off.
Seriously, don't cheap out on cooling your hardware. In the long run, you will regret it if you do.
The
If you can read this, you are most likely close enough.
What if you suddenly stop being able to remove the hot air? Your servers will be cooked inside their airtight racks.
Sounds like your business is playing the cheap card. You really need a qualified HVAC contractor with experience and references in datacenter design that can do a site analysis (trust me, it's more complicated than it looks.) If your business/manager thinks it too expensive or just doesn't think it's worth it, make sure you document your concerns and your request and then just let the servers bake. Sooner or later the servers and equipment will just start to fail due to heat loading and after a few good sized repair bills, maybe they'll get the hint that doing nothing or worse yet something stupid is more expensive than doing it right.
I setup a watercooled system for a small business once.
We created a custom setup for an HP Rack Cabinet using 3" PVC with 3/4" leads off off into each server, then 3/4" leads back out to another 3" PVC, which ran to a 30 gallon resivour before running outside to a set of 3 heat exchangers we were able to get for cheap via surplus. Each heat exchanger had 3/4" piping and a seperate pump and fan assembly. (about the size of a house heat pump exchanger.)
We programmed a PIC to monitor water temps and switch on the heat exchanger pumps and fans depending on load, with a minimum of one running all the time.
During the summer all 3 would run at peak, and during the winter only one would be on.
In VA the summer temps never peak above 95'F. I think the highest they have ever recorded on the hot-side temp sensor was 100'F (and 5'F rise over ambient for a whole server rack is not bad).
It was a lot of fun to build, but for an enterprise setup, a raised floor datacenter with proper Leibert cooling systems is the way to go. I would say more than two racks and your talking at the very least an industrial AC system w/ humidity controls (too dry == bad).
I've heard water cooling is up to 80% more effective than air cooling. You may want to consider a closed solution. It could lower your server exhaust temperature into the range that doesn't require any A/C changes at all.
Another inexpensive approach is to extend the vent via pvc etc. to extend directly to the server intake, but YMMV based on your actual setup.
I'm not sure about the AC, but folks at Planetmind run their servers on solar power. Perhaps this could free up some of your funds to put toward AC. http://www.planetmind.net/
We had a similar problem. In the long term you need to look at efficiency vs. installation cost.
Running one (or two) large units constantly just for a server room is in the long term quite expensive depending on where you live and how much the cost of electricity goes up. Unless you are in a facility that is staffed 24/7 (and I suspect you are not) there is no reason to do this.
For between $1800 and $3400 you can have a "mini split" system installed which will cool only one room, on its own thermostat and be completely self contained. It can be installed with a small pump to dump moisture out close to the external unit. With a cooling (compressor on) current of 9-10 amps, and 12000Btu of cooling, we are able to keep our (admittedly small) server room at around 65F, which gives more than enough response time for a unit malfunction before the temperature reaches critical levels.
We have a very small server room, maybe a little bigger than a walk-in closet. We have about 4 big box fans directing air into, and then out of the room. It doesn't keep the room "COOL" but it does prevent the stagnant hot air from expanding the HDDs :)
While not the best solution we used a standard window mount unit that you would find in your home.
We had some serious reconstruction work being done to out server room and during that our regular AC unit was taken offline so as not to clog it up with Construction dust. The unit mounted in a hole in the wall with the back end facing out into the Cube farm. While we as the tech group had to deal with the added heat from the AC unit in our office area, the Server Room stayed nice and cold. As for any water that was collected, that was resolved with two 5-gallon buckets. One that was empty and one that the water drained into. In an average 8-hour shift there was only about a quart of water in the bucket. Dumping the bucket each morning wasn't a problem since it was a short walk to the breakroom sink. The extra bucket simply took its place under the drain while you dumped the other.
This might be a quick fix for you, but then you also then have to deal with the security of having the wall unit. Since our cube farm was an internal office space accessed by key-card, the only folks that would have ready access would be the ones that worked on the boxen in the first place. So for us, the security issue was very small.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
We had a similar problem... the computer room is in the middle of our 6-room 1200 sq ft office, no windows, one ac duct on with the rest of the office. That rooms 8.5' by 12' (about 100 sq ft) with 9.5' ceilings. We now have 15 servers (mostly mid-range pc's but a few 8-core xeon boxes) running full time in there.
The solution came in several parts... first was to move any critical/primary stuff to our offsite servers and use the in-house boxes for backup and local-only stuff. We already had a cab at internap with some spare room.
Next we got a couple ceiling panels (its a false ceiling like in most office bldgs) that have a plastic grid for airflow instead of the usual cardboard foamy stuff.
We got rid of the nice locked, enclosed cabinets and got breadracks to increase airflow, and put two cheapy ($15) home depot oscillating fans in there.
If things get warm in the summer (i.e. today) we leave the door open for a bit and it cools down quickly. We're considering adding an exhaust fan/vent in the wall or ceiling, but since there's no exterior wall it's a pain, plus we'd have to deal with the landlord.
We probably only spent $100 and a day of labor, and it's "good enough."
Your goal is not to pump more cold air into the room, your goal is to remove the heat. More than one computer room has sized on the simple expedient of cutting a hole in a ceiling tile and lying a box fan on it, blowing up.
Make a good hot-air removal system and your existing cooling should work fine. Whatever system you use will have a point of failure.
Blowing out warm air doen't create a vaccuum. If the rest of the building is warm, new warm air flows in. If the rest of the building is cool, well cool air flows in.
The big problem: The effect of these a/c units are nearly equal to a ventilator. That's why those split a/c are the way to go. These transport the heat via some kind of liquid but do not move air to the outside.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
RIGHT!
Also, don't panic. Monitor your disk temperature but don't assume they will fail more often at 30C. Based on LOTS of data, Google published a paper that shows that disk temperature has to be right up to the rated max temp before any extra chance of failure appears.