Cost-Effective Server Room Air Conditioning? 414
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?"
Re:do what CIHost does (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually that's what we did at my last job.
We had a lab packed full of routers/switches/data generators for stress testing. There were issues with hot spots and equipment would randomly fail. Solution? buy a ton of box fans during the off-season at $10 each and place them in the lab to help with hotspots. Works great, and is an inexpensive solution.
Oh, and be sure to have a monitor on the A/C, so when it breaks on a weekend, you won't fry your equip.
insulation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Remove the heat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A Big fan. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
There's nothing you can do except open the windows (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Dual Air Conditioning Issues (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Go Geothermal! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Get a Better Job (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re:Antarctica (Score:5, 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 (Score:4, Interesting)
And some of the Scandinavian countries are courting datacenters. They have plenty of power from geothermal energy and also have the colder outside air to make cooling more efficient and/or basically free.
Re:insulation (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you don't. If you cool the room with A/C to the same temperature as any other office room, and it's right next to other office rooms, then there is no temperature gradient and no heat will move through even the flimsiest wall. On the other hand, when your A/C unit eventually fails, it'll get much, much hotter in a well-insulated room.
Sealing may help the A/C unit maintain humidity, if that's a problem for you.
Re:Antarctica (Score:3, Interesting)
Nevertheless I won't recommend anyone to use oil to get rid of heat problems - it was just a dumb but inspiring answer to a question which belongs in the former category of this sentence.
Re:this article blows (Score:1, Interesting)
You should always have a UPS anyway, but if you get at $400 or less air conditioner, you'd better pony up $1000 for a good power-conditioned UPS. Those air conditioners make beastly power spikes when they start up, which are Bad (tm) for servers.
I agree with the host of comments that say if $600 is scaring your boss off, that boss needs to get out of any business that involves IT resources.
They work fine here (Score:3, Interesting)
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.