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

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Wed Aug 7 12:29:04 EDT 2002


Multiply the power requirements (in watt) of all the machines in the
room by 3.4. That will give you a good starting point for the minimum
cooling system to remove the heat generated by the hardware.

All vents currently in the room should be blocked off. You do NOT want
an employee cranking up the heat because they are cold.

If the chiller is to be located in the same room with the equipment (bad
idea) make sure you provision for the exhaust air and condensate drip.
Mount the unit off the floor and use a gravity line to get rid of the
condensate. Pumps fail at the worst time. 

If your systems are "mission critical", use a redundant cooling system.
If you need a 12kBTU chiller according to your power load, get two. It's
cheaper to install 2 now than to replace one dead one later along with
the system that burned up and all the data on it.

On Wed, 2002-08-07 at 10:46, Christopher Bergeron wrote:
> 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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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
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