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?"

Comments

Antarctica

[ohxten]

Move the room to Antarctica, turn off the heat.

Re:Antarctica

[nbert]

Since a few years we hear about people putting everything in an aquarium filled with vegetable oil. The only downside is that the oil creeps up the cables going out, so you have to wipe them from time to time. Never heard of any larger setup of this kind, but it would be interesting.

And before someone mods me down consider this: The original article lacks info about just everything one would need in order to give reasonable advice: Location (local temperatures), heat output (amount of systems and what kind they are of), size of room and so on. So don't blame me but the guy who failed to articulate his question in a way that one could help him (plus the one putting it on the front page).

Re:Antarctica

[Shadow Wrought]

Move the room to Antarctica, turn off the heat.

Yeah, but if he's running Windows the penguins down there will attack.

this article blows

[Anonymous Coward]

if you can't afford $600 to cool the room, you need to turn off your servers.

Re:this article blows

[wgoodman]

I have a similar setup and have had to go into it with a very low budget. I have a ~$400 portable LG air conditioner. No worries on draining it since it's smart enough to use the hot air of the exhaust to evaporate the moisture and send it out the warm air duct. I leave the unit on the "Dry" setting which tends to keep the room plenty cool.

woooooosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Dry ice.

Just imagine the theatrics.

Simply this...

[actionbastard]

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.

Re:Simply this...

[linear a]

Sounds like you have more time than money. If you can't afford the cost to beef up the A/C, you can use some of the techniques used in server room design. If you can, take the cold air and put it directly into your hottest (or most expensive to replace maybe) and add partitions to channel the cold air where it will do the most good. Simply mixing a stream of cold air with the warm room air is not efficient. Put the limited cooling where it does the most good, don't let the cold air mix with the hot air, try to channel the hot air away from everything. As an added thought, and exhaust fan somewhere where it is hottest might do considerable good.

Simple answer is don't mess around

[banbeans]

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.

Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Maybe

[blair1q]

How far is it from Antarctica?

Turn off the servers

[Bronster]

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.

Re:Turn off the servers

[ktappe]

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.

Trying to re-educate the boss can easily backfire. When my company moved to a new building, ownership neglected to account for I.T. storage and workspace needs (workbench, shelving for spare monitors, PC's, cables, software, manuals, etc.) In protest (not wanting to turn my office into a store room), I stacked the stuff in the hallways of our nice new building. I thought this would give ownership the hint. Instead I got the evil eye from the owners and was outsourced shortly thereafter, despite seven years of service with consistently positive annual reviews.

Many owners/bosses got to where they are by persuading others that they know more than they actually do. When you show them up, you become an obstacle to their ambition and ego. To their thinking, you, not the item they were wrong about, is what needs "fixing".

Your boss refusing to pay $600 for A/C to keep thousands of dollars worth of servers running that (probably) contain data worth tens or even hundreds of thousands, is the real problem. But make sure you have calmly and unchallengingly made this clear to him/her. Use phrases like "The plant would be down X days if the servers fail due to heat. How much would that cost?"

As for trying to rig something up yourself, I wouldn't unless you're a certified HVAC technician. Make that clear to the boss too (again as gently as you can). "I'm not trained in this. I don't want to accidentally take A/C away from anyone else--they have work to do to and we can't afford to lower their productivity." Again, make the costs of the lack of $600 apparent if you can.

Good luck!

Cost of doing business

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

You can cut corners - but if a 20 Amp circuit + $600 for a cheap unit is scaring you off, you are out of your league.

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...

keginator

[bugs2squash]

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.

Re:Not much you can do

[sharkey]

Is that more or less dangerous than dihydrogen monoxide?

HVAC design for Server rooms

[Elfich47]

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.