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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?"
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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'!"
See! Problem solved!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"Let the room overheat and replace all the computing hardware. So what if you're down for a week?"
Don't forget the BOFH option. :)
Back everything up.
Wait until meltdown, then be the hero for restoring the new systems.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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)
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 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.
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.
.
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
You sure you`re thinking of the right BOFH? The one I know would do something more like this:
Backup nothing
lock Boss or some lusers in server room along with any old hardware
Go on Junket
Come back and blame mess on now dead Boss/Luser
Buy new hardware from whomever is willing to give the best kickback.
That's a good way to go and I'm happy someone had enough sense to actually bring it up.
The first step is to figure out how much cooling you actually need. If you're running commercial grade hardware the BTU/Hr heat output should be listed on the spec sheets. Add it up.
If you're running unrated consumer grade hardware, consider looking for another job. Failing that, though, you can guestimate the heat load by adding up the max output of all the power supplies in the room, multiply by 1.25 (account for PSU efficiency, wiggle room) then convert watts to BTU/Hr by multiplying again by 3.41 (Not Pi - read carefully...)
You'll need an AC unit that meets or exceeds this BTU/Hr rating. I would recommend a split/ductless system for ease of installation: One unit sits outside on a (preferably concrete) pad, the other half hangs on the wall, and you only need a fist-sized hole in the wall to run the pipes and wiring. Such an installation is a pro job, though.
If you insist on going it alone, then portable AC units (as some have mentioned) are your second best bet - just need an exhaust duct, typically 6-8 inch diameter. Most units will evaporate any condensation into the exhaust air.
=Smidge=
Yes, but it's a good rule of thumb that if the language has evolved at the hands of a business consultant, they're just trying to make an ordinary, everyday job description sound sexy and exciting through deliberate obfuscation and complication of syntax. "I've been tasked with getting a tiger team to think outside the box vis-a-vis their normal operational paradigm with regards to proactively seeking out new-media revenue generation through forward-thinking distribution channels" sounds a lot sexier to the average suit than "We need more money. What ideas do you internet nerds have?"
Given the ridiculously limited budget and the extent of responsibility, he's probably the son or nephew of the owner or the boss himself. Underclocking the systems would protect the hardware and probably reduce current heat problems. Not getting caught would just be a BOFH=in-training field test. It was supposed to be funny BTW.
Here's another antisocial solution. Install the AC on an inside wall. It's cheaper to just cut through sheetrock.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
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 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.