[ale] [OT] Supplemental HVAC for server rooms?

Matt Smith msmith at risklabs.com
Wed Aug 7 11:14:13 EDT 2002


I'll tell you from personal experience a few things about cooling a server
room.

First of all, you ALWAYS need two.  Unless your machines power themselves
off automatically when they get too hot, they'll cook themselves and
everything else in the room when the only A/C fails.  I've seen it happen.
Within a few hours our room got so hot the fire dampers in the A/C unit
actually activated from the heat.  That's like >125F... Partially Melted
wire management, cables, and a year or so of heat-related system failures
(power supplies, hard drives, etc) trickling in.

Disconnect the duct from the central A/C.  I'm assuming this is in Georgia,
so that's an _H_VAC duct, which means in the winter, hot air will be coming
from it, which is not what you want, even in the winter.

Sounds like the unit you're talking about is a "spot cooler"-type unit.. We
had one of those before we moved into our current space.. If you can go with
two smaller units, rather than one larger one, you'll benefit from enhanced
airflow to keep all the servers comfortable, and also get the benefit of
redundancy.  The room may get warm when you only have one, but it won't get
as warm as fast as I mentioned earlier.  Again, assuming this is a
spot-cooler-type machine it has the hot condenser air that you blow
elsewhere.. spring for the condenser intake duct too so that you don't
create a vacuum in the room..  without it your cooling performance will be
reduced  because you can't get enough air through, and if the door doesn't
totally seal it'll make a hell of a whistle from the air getting sucked
around the door.

You may have already done this, but you can roughly estimate your heat load
in the room by adding up the wattages for all your devices, add in some for
people if necessary and lighting, then convert to BTU's (search online for a
conversion calculator - there's tons).  That'll tell you what you need.

Hope this helps.


--Matt


-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Bergeron [mailto:christopher at bergeron.com]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 10:47 AM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] [OT] Supplemental HVAC for server rooms?


Hey guys, I have a quick question for ya about adding supplemental AC to 
a server room.  We're relocating the company to a new floor of our 
building (6th from 2nd).  The server room is approx 12'x12'.  The room 
has an existing AC duct from the central Air Conditioning for the suite. 
 Since all the servers are going to be consolidated into one room, we've 
decided to add supplemental AC to the room.  The AC unit is a floor 
standing unit about the size of a wine chiller (19 inches  wide by 3 
feet tall, about 20" deep).  The AC unit costs about a grand ($1000).

Here's my quandry:
I think that a single unit will be sufficient to cool the room.  One of 
my co-workers says we need 2 of them.

I know that cooler is better for machines; however, our company has been 
cutting costs lately, and if we don't need the second unit I don't think 
we should purchase it.  I belive it does something like 12,000 BTUs.

We have an AS/400 and an RS/6000 in the server room along with about 7 
linux and 1 NT support servers (Samba, etc).  Can anyone shed any light 
on this for me?


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