Cooling Safe Room Temperature for Servers?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by OneSeventeen, 14 Aug 2007.

  1. OneSeventeen

    OneSeventeen Oooh Shiny!

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    What is a safe temperature for a room with Servers?

    I just got a digital thermometer with a display on my desk of the server-room, and it seems to stay right at 85F/29C. Is that dangerous for the server, or just uncomfortable for the admin?

    note: I'm measuring the ambient temperature from next to the server rack, not directly on top of a server or inside the rack.
     
  2. Ramble

    Ramble Ginger Nut

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    I think that'll be fine.
     
  3. antiHero

    antiHero ReliXmas time!

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    Our server room is around 30 degrees but its safer if you check the case temps. We had no problems so far but its not so nice to sit in there :)
     
  4. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Seems a bit on the high-ish side, but the manufacturers of whatever kit in there should have max recommended room temps

    Across 3 machine rooms, we keeps the temps at 18c, 20c and 25c

    the last one used to be around 20c, but recently hundreds of blades have gone in, and the ACs can't quite cope. :blush:
     
  5. zr_ox

    zr_ox Whooolapoook

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    I believe IBM lay down the law regarding this and it's currently recommended to keep temps at 18C.

    Our server room is at 19.2C ground level, middle of the room is 18C and upper section at 17.something.
     
  6. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Where do you take your measurements?

    Ours are measured off the ACs intake, hot aisles are *toasty*, cold aisles in the mid teens

    I take it ibm spec would be for the intake temp of the unit in question?
     
  7. OneSeventeen

    OneSeventeen Oooh Shiny!

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    Good to know I'm not killing my servers.

    We have cool air blowing slowly on the back of the rack. (singular, as we only have one rack, and about 20 PC's pretending to be servers around the campus) But now that I'm slowly adding a few of the desktop PCs to the LAN workstation in there, I just want to make sure I'm not burning them out.

    Thanks for the tips!

    I'm going to try to shoot for 70F or 21C if I can, but it all depends on how well we can pipe it in without producing condensation. (Plus the "server room" is my closet, and my office is 30.2C at the moment, so if we could drop the closet we'd probably be a nice 25C in here :D)
     
  8. zr_ox

    zr_ox Whooolapoook

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    Our measurements are taken at server level, then from a thermometer in the at 1.8 meters, then at the AC intake. IBM sent a consultant out since we had to have to room checked 16 months ago for compliance. We are not allowed to assume that the intake temperature is good enough since it will always be the coldest, we need to go by the overall ambient room temperature. You can be a certain % over without it being too much of a problem though. The reason you need it is to cover insurance, if you lose data or a fire starts and you try to claim compensation the first thing they will look at is the server environment.

    8 months ago our AC unit broke down, It's hooked up to a modem so if the temp goes above 25C then it calls us. When I arrived the room temp was 35C and 2 unix servers had crashed.

    In the ideal world an AC unit should be installed at server level so that they have access to the coolest air.
     
  9. hydro_electric_655

    hydro_electric_655 Dremelly Dude

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    Sounds like you need a mineral Oil server.
     
  10. zr_ox

    zr_ox Whooolapoook

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    Thats not such a bad idea :)
     
  11. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    We did a "what if" a couple months ago and switched off all of the ACs in the warmest/largest of the 3 rooms, after 20 mins, all hardware temps were still within spec (though some of them were borderline, mostly cisco gear), ambients were far higher than 18C.

    What size machine room are we talking about here, "overall ambient room temperature" is pretty vague. Every room have hot spots and cold spots. Do you use hot aisles and cold aisles?
     
  12. Arthur2Sheds

    Arthur2Sheds Jackson

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    It's a converted closet that houses a bunch of other junk and has weird slanted walls you can hit your head on if you're not careful. It's not meant to be a server room, but it's done the trick so far.
     
  13. zr_ox

    zr_ox Whooolapoook

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    Hi,

    Were talking about a Server Room which is 6m x 7m.

    We have servers on both sides of the room, 1 row along one wall and another row on the other side. The temperatures are measured on both sides of the room, we dont use the hot and cold aisles principle since their is only 1 rack server.

    Sure we have hot spots, generally at the backs of all servers. Our monitoring has been done simultaneously at each server and shows temps to be very consistent across both sides of the room.
     
  14. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    This could explain why I'm getting confused
    I'm have in my mind something in the region of 35x35m, where you will always get temperature fluctiations throughout the room.

    Surely though, with all of your temps measured at hardware level there are differences throughout the room. eg given a globally consistent ambient temperature, cisco hardware is still going to run at different temps as an HP9000, which is going to be different to a xeon :eyebrow:
     
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