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Cooling a Hot Server Room

I run several servers in a small room with little ventilation. The tempurature is routinely 15-20*F above the out door tempurature and at least 10*F above the rest of the building. I traced the source of the heat to the exhaust of the servers' power supplies. They blow a constant 90*F stream of air. Since I can't do anything to alter the air conditioning of the room, is there a cooler running brand of power supply of about 450w that I can install on the servers?

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Lee W, MVP

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jamietoner

I agree with leew, the room needs to be cooled. if there is a window in the room you might want to consider one of those air conditioners, if there isnt a window a portable air conditioner would also work. The air conditioner isnt cheap but it's less than a replacement server and a data recovery. on a dell server if the room is over 95°F and the server fails the failure is not covered by warranty, because the server was running outside specified enviromental conditions.

nobus

since PC's and servers produce heat, you have to cool them.
Possible options :
- ventilation : install a tube with fans on it , transferring the server air into the outside
- air conditioning : in fact the same, but with additional cooling

there are no other wonder solutions i know of, except of transporting dayly some deep frozen ice cubes into the room, and removing them when they warm up

Jonathan Kaplan

ASKER

I do notice that one server is an Athlon 64 3000+ CPU and the other, the one blowing the most hot air, is a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz. I also notice that the Athlon's PS fan is still-- not turning. Since the overall load on the two servers is similar, would the difference in the two CPUs' power consumption be that dramatic that one fan would not need to run? If so, I think I'll change the Pentium hardware. If, on other hand, both PS fans should be running, I have a bad PS in the Athlon. Then, I'll have to replace the Athlon PS and look into area cooling solutions.

nobus

>> the Athlon's PS fan is still-- not turning << i wopuld try another PS - it should run !

rindi

If this isn't a redundant powersupply which only kicks in when the other one isn't working, change the PSU yesterday!

As the others have already mentioned it isn't just the PSU generating the heat. The reason that you think it is the PSU is because that is the place where all the heat leaves the server...

PS, I like nobus' idea with the Ice cubes, only I don't think you'll have to remove them when they warm up! The way that room heats up they will probably be vapour anyway...