Question : Problem: How hot can a server room be?

Hi,
  We are moving to a new building that does not have Air Conditioning in the server room. To put in air conditioning will cost $40,000. We can't use a portable cooler as it's against buidling policy.

I've done a test of our current server room and if I turn of the air conditioning the rooms grow to 80 deg F.
We have 4 dell servers, phone equipment and networking equip.
The servers are all dell poweredge 2800s.

Dell's site lists the operating range as 50-95 deg F.

I'm wondering if it will be alright to run our servers at 80-85 deg F. This would be ongoing with no end in site.
I spoke with one dell rep that said it would be fine, but he was in presales and I'm not confident in what he said. Does anyone have any experience with this?

thanks
David

Answer : Problem: How hot can a server room be?

Oh, sorry.  Incomplete answer.

From a strict "will they run" perspective yes, you can get away with a room termperature of 85.  I have seen it done.  But from the perspective of "is this good for our computers", I personally wouldn't chance it.  Your servers are going to be running hotter, and that is not great especially for things like hard drives.  Remember that the environment specifications are based on what you can do, not what you should do.

The biggest problem I see is that there is no margin.  If much dust gets caught up in the fins of the CPU heat sinks you are very likely to get into an overheat situation.  If the building AC is turned off one weekend you are already running on the hot side, so the room will fairly quickly go into "way too hot" mode.

If you absolutly cannot find an AC unit in your budget, consider modifying the server room door to provide a lot of ventalation to the room.  That way you can at least provide an outlet for some of the heat to escape instead of building up in a closed environment.

For comparison sake, we ran all of our data centers (co-location facilities) at a consistant 72 - 74.


Have you looked at the wall-mount units designed for small server rooms?  They are not portable (so wouldn't violate building policy), but install fairly easily.  Also a whole lot cheaper than the $40,000 you have been quoted.  I had a customer who put two of these into their server room for something around $12K.

I would also challenge the building policy if there is any room for that.  After all, portable units are standard fare for computer room A/C.  They are proven both safe and reliable.  I have even seen fairly good size server rooms that utilize portable units (albeit large ones).