Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsnt.misc (
More info?)
Blarneystone wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wonder if you can help me with this challenge...
>
> I have been asked to find a way to move four Dell Tower servers from 2
> locations into a small office supply room that has no stand alone air
> conditioning unit. The building is constructed in a way that I cannot
> have a cooling system installed in a wall or ceiling due to structural
> limitations.
>
> There is no window in the room, so any water runoff from an AC unit
> would probably have to be taken care of manually (by me emptying a pan
> or something) - which I am fine doing if we bought a stand alone AC
> unit. But it would probably be in violation of several building codes
Does the room have an outside wall? If yes, then what about an
external air conditioner? I had this done with a small
window-less basement server room about 10 years ago. The holes
in the walls were be small: two 4" holes for the ducts and much
small ones for the power and control lines.
If the building is so bad structurally that it can't take a
couple of 4" holes, run for your life.
If you had to, you could get by with just one 4" duct for
delivering the cold air. I had a second duct put in with a
separate fan to expel the hot air that had risen to the top of
the room.
>
>
> I have been offered the money to buy server racks with the fans on top
> - yet I don't think those will help the heat level in this room.
If you can duct the air up from the top of the case and out of
the room - even if only into a hallway, it would help.
> Currently in one big location, 3 of the servers raise the room temp to
> 86-90 degrees depending on the day. These Dell servers are certified
> to run up to 95 degrees.
You don't say what the servers are.
If they are Xeon boxes, consider switching to Opterons. Four 2
GHz dual Opteron machines will outperform and use about 500 W
less than four 3 GHz dual Xeon machines. 500 W less heat is a
huge difference in a small server room.
With the new dual-core Opterons you could get even larger heat
reductions. The dual-core Opterons outperform a pair of
single-core Opterons at the same clock speed, while using about
the same amount of power as /one/ single-core Opteron. In other
words, you would be able to cut the number of processors needed
in half - you could either reduce the number of servers or reduce
the number of processors per server.
Over the last year I have become so impressed with the computing
performance and thermal efficiency of Opterons that it will be
years, if ever, before I ever consider Xeons again. Xeons use a
heck of a lot more power while accomplishing less than Opterons -
it just doesn't make sense to use them any more.
>
> I am sure some of you have had to deal with this problem before...how
> did you solve it?
>
I also worked in one place where a small closet was built to hold
a few servers, and then an air-conditioner was mounted on the
side of the closet. The closet got cooled off nicely, but only
at the expense of warming up the rest of the room.