Server Room Cooling Suggestions

RobertKaucher

I have been telling management that we need to cool the server room. We are a small shop and they have never cooled it before, so they think it is a luxury. I compared it to not changing your oil ever and taking a cross country trip.

I have a thermometer in the server room that tells me it gets about 82F on a cool day outside. Recently it started getting to the high 80s and low 90s. The server that runs our SQL server and our ERP software rebooted due to the heat. It has been all I can do to keep the room at 82F so that the server does not reboot again. Now they have agreed to get some sort of cooling. I have 7 servers and a SonicWall router in the room. The room is roughly 100 square feet.
We will be able to put in ventilation.
I’d love to hear any suggestions for cooling systems you guys have used.

Forgot to mention... I am assuming 2399 BTU/HR for each server. I am sure this is a large over estimate, but I think it is a good number for scalability's sake.

120nm4n

Depends on how much you can spend and how much you're going to expand. For years, my company used a portable AC unit to cool down our server room. Since I started, though, we have tripled the number of servers we have and ended up installing a small commercial unit (~10 ton, IIRC). The server room used to be in the upper 70s and low 80s. Now we keep it at 65. Our server room isn't much bigger, maybe 250 sq ft.

arwes

At my last job we had a Liebert Challenger 3000 that performed amazingly well. It controlled the temperature and the humidity levels in the room. I think the room was around 250 sq ft and I believe we had the 3 ton model. I have no idea what the price was on it, but I see the 5 ton on a Google search for around $6,500. The good thing is it's standalone so if there's a problem with your primary AC, at least the server room will still be cool.

Liebert Challenger 3000 | Air Conditioner, HVAC, CRAC

I tried to talk my current boss into purchasing the one from my former employer (they consolidated data centers and sold off much of their equipment) but he decided to stick an air handler unit in there that's attached to our chiller system. He didn't realize that the chillers shut down from 9:00 PM - 1:00 AM automatically. Server room temps were nearly 100 degrees by midnight! There's no way around the 9-1 cycle either, so we put a APC rack air removal system on the rack and it's been better, but we've spent a lot more money than we would have had we gone with the Liebert.

msteinhilber

I've been trying to get better cooling approved as well. We have 26 servers, two Nortel Option 11c chassis fully loaded, and 4 routers and 6 switches running.

All we have for cooling in a room about 250 sq feet is one of these guys:

Sunpentown WA-1010M Portable Air Conditioner - Free Shipping

It's a good day if the room doesn't go over 90 degrees.

Something like what we have worked well when there was half the equipment and half the size room to cool, but not so much anymore.

RTmarc

I'm a fan of the APC Infrastructure line of products. I like their mentality of data center management versus silo-ing their product lines.

RobertKaucher

msteinhilber wrote: »

I've been trying to get better cooling approved as well. We have 26 servers, two Nortel Option 11c chassis fully loaded, and 4 routers and 6 switches running.

All we have for cooling in a room about 250 sq feet is one of these guys:

Sunpentown WA-1010M Portable Air Conditioner - Free Shipping

It's a good day if the room doesn't go over 90 degrees.

Something like what we have worked well when there was half the equipment and half the size room to cool, but not so much anymore.

When it was working well what was the average temperature?

msteinhilber

Mid 70's usually, we had closed the cold air ducts from the buildings HVAC to achieve that and just leave the hot air returns open.

RobertKaucher

Thanks, every body. You've all given me some good information to look into.

hypnotoad

Clean your AC (if you have one) -- this time of year, pollen and cottonwood and stuff gets in the coils and AC's don't run well. Recharge the freon if it's that time.

Blow the dust out of your servers. Make sure there's good airflow.

Turn equipment off if it can be turned off.

Look at virtualization.

Look at management on the servers that will send an alarm if the temp gets too high.

If you have Dell Servers (probably other brands?), you can use online tools to estimate BTU's and tons of cooling required.

Don't place your thermostat where the servers vent hot air.

7 * 2400 = 16800 BTU's. You can get this out of a large Window AC.

Also, make sure the AC will turn back on by itself if the power goes out (don't put the AC on your UPS)...our ACs have to be manually turned back on when the power goes out.

Make sure you have spare components on hand (or an appropriate warranty) -- powersupplies and hard drives don't like heat. So if one does break, you can replace it.

laidbackfreak

i wont mention the fact to make sure your ac is secure, someone kindly turned off one of ours recently in 1 of our core sites !!

sufice to say the heat (yes we do get some in the uk) managed to kill one of the routers and an aggregate bearer plus a couple of other circuits and basically cut off about a dozen of our sites !

so id say cooling a little bit more than a luxury :-/

RTmarc

laidbackfreak wrote: »

so id say cooling a little bit more than a luxury :-/

I agree. In my experience I've found that proper power supply and cooling of the data center is one of those necessities that upper management likes to neglect because of the high price tag. Usually to their own detriment.

Claymoore

Dilbert builds a datacenter

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bertieb

RTmarc wrote: »

I agree. In my experience I've found that proper power supply and cooling of the data center is one of those necessities that upper management likes to neglect because of the high price tag. Usually to their own detriment.

Indeed, and if you don't get it right first time........ erk.
We are replacing the air-con and doing some fettling with floor voids in one of our older DC's at the moment. Some of the nice heat trend graphs and scientific air flow diagrams look groovy. Having said that, I suspect the senior management will go with the cheap options and I'll be making Dilberts presentation to them shortly

Forsaken_GA

laidbackfreak wrote: »

i wont mention the fact to make sure your ac is secure, someone kindly turned off one of ours recently in 1 of our core sites !!

sufice to say the heat (yes we do get some in the uk) managed to kill one of the routers and an aggregate bearer plus a couple of other circuits and basically cut off about a dozen of our sites !

so id say cooling a little bit more than a luxury :-/

Thankfully, this is one place where my company doesn't skimp on. A very large part of our opex is the HVAC system. We just moved into a new data center, and they pulled out all of the stops, it stays around 60-65 in there around the clock, whereas our old DC was usually about 75 most of the time, and crept up around 80 at times. I've had to bring a spare jacket to leave at work for when I'm spending a long amount of time in the data center, 15 minutes, and I'm freezing my behind off

Hyper-Me

Do you guys not have devices that detect temp thresholds and notify you?

Our room ran pretty darn hot until we put the equallogic SAN in there. We turned it on and about 10 minutes later it lit up like a christmas tree and wouldnt stop beeping because it blew past the temp thresholds. 3 days later we had a 5 ton dedicated unit for that room.

laidbackfreak

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Do you guys not have devices that detect temp thresholds and notify you?

Yep got those in place to email us alerts too, but someone had un-plugged it !

We have an investigation going on to find out exactly what happened, but knowing this place it'll get forgotten about soon enough.