Home Server Rooms?

Tuzanor writes "I've got a buddy moving into a brand new house. Being geeks, we've decided to wire the house with a large home network. While this story took care of wiring the house, we need to figure out how to create a well set up server room. We'll be having both towers and rack mounted computers as well as various switches, UPSes, etc. Also, we figure this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night (without opening a window)"

Invitations

You could try to invite some cool chicks.

heat concerns

As far as heat is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much. Given the extreme lack of sexual activity associated with wiring your house with switches, UPSes, and god-knows what other geek toys, your house should stay plenty cold throughout the year, especially during the winter.

What I did...

Well, I recently converted what used to be a 10'x6' pantry in my basement into a server room.

I tore out all of the old shelves, and picked up a bunch of nicer ones from Revy to hold my main servers and my (still nonfunctional) cluster, and screwed them into one of the longer walls. Opposite that, I used some of the old shelves to
make a small workbench, and I left room to add 2 or 3 racks (not that I'll ever need that much space) at a later date. It works really well, and because it used to be a pantry, and 2 of the walls are bare concrete, as is the floor, its stays down right COLD in there, even with 10 or so boxes going.

Come on...

Is this a serious question?

Just set up the ventilation system to suck warm air from the top of the server room, and pipe it to the colder rooms in the house.

For air return, install intakes near the bottom of some of the colder rooms.

It would cost like $50 at a home improvement store to get enough flexible ducting and registers.

Go to a surplus site like www.mpja.com and get some AC powered fans with a good CFM output.

Re:Come on... [And as a geek]

It shouldn't be too difficult for you to set up some thermostatic switches to control the system. Just make it blow cold air (even from outside) into the server room when it's needed and blow the hot air into the rest of the furnace system when you need that in the rest of the house.

If the server room is going to be in the basement, you probably could just put a blower vent going into the main flume from near the ceiling of the server room, and then spill the cold air from the rest of the house (or just some of it) into the server room, again from the ceiling. Then it'll be the coolest room in the house, and not just because it has a bunch of computers!

Here's another tip, put the hot-air sucker near the outside wall, and the cold air blower nearer to the center of the house. That'll keep the air moving and thermoclining (layers of different temp air).

Good luck!

electricity

Something to consider: in California right now, electricity runs $0.10 to $0.25 per kw/hour. That means the cost per 100 watts of 24/7 computer equipment is between $7 and $23 per month. Easy ouch.

Next, don't be a cooling idiot. If it's cold outside and your server room is hot, use the server room to warm the rest of the house. Air circulation. Central placement of server room in basement.

Re:electricity

There's still no reason to waste it. He lives in Canada, I live in North Dakota, I could use the heat put out by a server room during the winter. It would sure save on heating.

Bathroom

Even better, put it in the bathroom, put your servers in the shower and just run water on them. Having them in that bathroom makes it easier to surf for pr0n while on the hopper.

Re:Serious answer

I am dead serious when I tell you know I know two people who run a very successful consulting firm around my ara who have their servers in a bathroom inside their house. When I asked them why they put them there, the answer was "We don't use this bathroom, it's in the middle of the house, and it's the most secure since it has no windows in it."

Ask serious questions, get slightly stupid answers :)

It's a bit unorthodox but...

Start with two racks, fill them with servers, Put the towers in the middle. Now, stuff those in to a small closet. You're running these all a bit OC'd, right? Great, now got to the store and pick up a product called "Cake Mix." Follow the directions on the box. It will likley need milk, water, and eggs. Put this solution in a pan and then you've got an oven that can play quake.

Multi-zone Heating/Cooling...

Why didn't you just ask a local heating/cooling company? There several ways to handle it... depending on the size of the house, you can have multiple systems, or have dampers in the the ventilation system that can control the air flow to each rooms (with multiple thermostats).

No, no, no!

You don't want a carefully planned, neatly laid-out NoC with aircon, swivel chairs, subdued lighting etc. A good comfy ops room shoudl grow organically over the years.

You want a cramped, untidy little room, with a stack of buzzing boxen to the left (from the bottom: OpenBSD, Linux, Cisco IOS, topped off with an old 15" monitor). No KVM - that's cheating; you have to scrabble around amongst the spaghetti cabling to switch the monitor to another box. Keep spare kbd's, mice etc draped over the monitor or propped against the wall when not in use; with the lights off, those three extra LEDs on the keyboard add to the girlfriend-impressing "Starship Enterprise" look'n'feel. To the right, balanced on top of the tower system housing your main workstation, you want an old analogue modem, and a desktop switch of some sort. Make sure the CAT5 from the rest of the house terminates just behind this switch - that way you get to mix the network cables up with the PSU, parallel cable->backup device, serial extenstions, phone plug-thrus etc. Top with stacks of unread magazines - New Scientist, Perl Journal etc - a couple of rows of books (remember to break the O'Reilly hegemondy with a carefully placed K&R, the Conway book, perhaps something on OO, SQL, firewalls, IDS and network security. Season with a sprinkling of "carefully filed" hardcopies of whitepapers, Slashdot stories, tech specs, man pages, discussions on the use of IGMP in scanning.

Remember to get the carpet professionally steam-cleaned once or twice a year. Remember to empty the waste basket and remove uneaten food and drink containers.

Cover the walls in Dilbert cartoons, printouts of UserFriendly, inadvertently amusing advertising materials, color "maps of the internet", and the SANS "Network Security Roadmap" poster (change every six months!)

My personal shelter from the world, which looks just like this of course, copes with (a) having no radiators (or windows) by being right in the core of the building, so avoiding getting too hot in summer; and (b) avoiding getting too cold in winter (it's below zero outside, here in the UK at present) by housing the central heating boiler.

At one point I seriously contemplated moving a campbed in here to save rent (I'm unemployed, & live in a shared house.) But my girlfriend said she'd cut my balls off, and then leave me. So that was that :)

Don't worry, be happy...

When it comes right down to it, it's really not that much of an issue.

I'm on my 3rd house, which like the previous ones is automated and has several servers, switches, UPSs, etc running 24/7. The truth is that there is not *that* much excess heat generated in a typical scenario. Sure, you can pile up lots of servers to do odd jobs, just to try and make it look like some mini server-room, but that's hardly cost effective, or efficient.

Without knowing the size of the room, the approximate BTU output of the machines and devices, and the heat loss factors of the room, nobody can *really* make any informed decisions.

My sever room and wiring closet is about 6' x 12', which was also about the size of my previous room. I don't do anything special to control airflow or temp. I *do* have a temp sensor in there to monitor things, just in case, but I've found that it tends to stay at about 65F in the winter and about 77F in the summer. Hardly worth spending tons of money to try and regulate the temperature better, I'd rather invest in another lighting controller or touchscreen :)

Noble principles but...

(without opening a window)

What's wrong with opening a window? I know, I know, everybody here loves Linux, but aren't you getting carried away here?

Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

Re:Noble principles but...

The process of opening a window is under a BSD license. A GPL solution is needed.

It's all about design

A good home server room is just as good as the design behind it. That's probably why it's an AskSlashdot question. An apt one, too.
In my home, I set up my server room before we even officially moved in. I can get pics if people desire, but I'll give the gist here.

First, it needs to be in the basement. Some people think it's only a heat issue, but the reality is that server rooms are noisy. I've only got four machines whirring about, and that alone is enough to sound like a wind tunnel.

Second, build shelving such that you can walk around it and access equipment from the rear. How many tower cases have RJ-45 connectors on the front side? Didn't think so. I built shelving out of 2x4's, 3/4" plywood, lag bolts, and drywall screws. Some day I'll get around to putting formica all over everything (it's not that expensive and easy to do). Everything is strong enough to hold me jumping up and down without any wiggle.

Third, carefully design how your wires are going to run. Raceways are a great idea, though you can also go the cheap route and use ziptie loops that have screw holes. Also, network wires should not be in the same raceway (and not parallel) to power cables.

Finally, place your equipment. Servers should be placed where they most make sense, e.g. don't put the internal file server next to the router and the public webserver on the other end. People should get a "feeling" of what your machine's duties are visually. Also, keep networking gear all in the same area--hubs, switches, and even modems and your incoming ISP equipment. That's also the best place for your router.

In addition, consider a KVM. They really are helpful, and cut down a lot on heat (and space needs). Some even have remote extenders--with mine I can work on any machine in my server room from my desktop in my office area. Definitely beats working in the wind tunnel.

Re:It's all about design

You know, geeking out now and then is cool and all, but why, exactly, do you need this much server equipment for a "home network?"

Personally, I have ONE well-configured machine acting as the firewall, the router, and the file server. There would be a seperate machine providing external 'net service (HTTP) if I could think of any damn good reason I needed a web server at my house.

So, one well-configured machine with 2 NICs, one 8-port ethernet switch and a DSL modem equals: one short Cat5 cable to the DSL modem, 4 power cables (one for the seldom-used monitor), and 8 Cat5 cables run to the rest of the house.

What you and almost everyone else is describing here is more of what you'd find in much more commercial places, and a bit overkill if you ask me. My single-machine setup works just fine, and the advantage of one machine is that you DON'T need any additional cooling.

All of it fits in a closet, and I can work with the server from any part of the house with a tektronix X-terminal, or the computer that happens to be there.

So, I guess I wonder where the advantage is of having enough machines to have to design it so that people get a "feeling" of what my machines' duties are visually? What's the point of having a huge NOC in your house?

Is there a point, or is it just merely to geek-out to the point of overkill, which I can also respect, but can't logically submit myself to?

Separation of firewall and application duties

Personally, I have ONE well-configured machine acting as the firewall, the router, and the file server. There would be a seperate machine providing external 'net service (HTTP) if I could think of any damn good reason I needed a web server at my house.

I personally have two machines - one being nothing but a firewall and router and the other being all those handy services that you need on a home network (file storage, DNS, web proxy, testing DB and web server, etc).

There are good reasons for this split of duties:

• The firewall is running a minimal setup - no setuid binaries, no listening to arbitary ports (port 22 is the only open port, and even that is only opened on the internal interface), no wu-ftpd or whatever the latest insecure daemon is (oh yeah - no public BIND!!!).
  
• I frequently mess with the config of my internal server, trying something different, upgrading to new versions of software. It's hard to keep a system secure under these changes. I very rarely touch the firewall box.
  
• Attackers have to break two different machines (which should be running two different OSen, but I'm lazy, and LRP based firewall systems are easier than picobsd for what I want) to get access to anything. The router machine only has 16Mb of memory, and boots off a floppy - it's even going to be hard for the attacker to copy a binary in, with no wget or similar installed. If it gets broken, I just hit the reset button, and the write-protected floppy has the same config (which I guess I'd want to check anyway, for how they got in).
  

In summary - home networks needs 2 machines - one providing security, one providing services.

Use The Heater, and a Few Other (Odd) Ideas

Why not run ducts behind all the computers and have those ducts be the intake from outside for the heater? That way, the air comes in cold, get's warmed up (so your heater doesn't have to do as much) and cools the computers/room (serving it's purpose), then it's business as usual.

Another suggestion is that when I lived in Salt Lake City our house had water heating. What if you ran pipes behind the computers with fins on the pipes (like a heatsink) then that water could go into the hot water heater. Once again, saving you some money.

Where is the room located physically? Don't forget that an underground external room (as opposed to a room in the middle of the house) will be cooler.

Being true geeks, you're probably not opposed to spending some moolah on this. What about doing something like this [freeserve.co.uk] guy did? If you buried a few large tanks deep the ground deep so it's below the frost line, you'd get cold water for free. Then just hook all you're PCs into water cooling. Have them all draw from the same spot, and then all empty back in. That way you get free cooling and it'd be quiet. If you look back at my earlier suggestion involving the water heater, you'd be all set.

950sq. feet, 13 PCs...

11 1GHz+ computers, 2 old workstations, 48 ports of Catalyst goodness and an external RAID enclosure. Most of it in a 10x12 room.

First thing is: Open a goddamn window. Block vents if you're worried about screwing up your heating/cooling bill. Get a little Window AC for summertime - not that you're going to get 100 F summer days in Canada, but just in case you need it. The windows in my apartment building are extra-wide, so I have two box fans sitting side-by-side in my window, one blowing air in, the other blowing out.

Scrounge a rack if you have to - the kind musicians use is cheaper than the ones computer people pay for. I pulled mine out of a dumpster at an Exodus NOC. I have a number of the identical tower cases - so I stacked them at the bottom of the rack, and started the rackmount stuff I have (a disk array, a catalyst 5005, KVM, and big ol' UPS) above that.
Rack-mount stuff costs too much money but I love having everything in one place. I'll bet wooden shelves would be just fine if I didn't have stuff that fit inside the rack already.

A $30 "Hobby" labelmaker works great for keeping cables straight. That and a whole bunch of chicken-straps (cable ties) and variety of velcro implements should be considered essential.

Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot? In the past I wouldn't consider carpet in an area with lots of computers, but since I'm at home, I'm thinking maybe the noise-deadening features of a good, thick carpet might be a good thing.

I don't pay for electricity (obviously!). I have no idea how much all this stuff costs to run. All my machines are on a UPS, though, which is handy. $99 500VA generic units are better than nothing at all. There's a pretty big electrical load in my tiny little apartment, but I'm lucky in that my computer room has, for some reason, outlets on three different circuits. I should think that having outlets on two circuits would be a minimum, particularly if you're in an apartment or older home, where tripping a breaker is either easier or more likely than a new home.

Use cool computers?

Do you already have all this equipment, or are you planning to kit out the room after you move in?

If you plan ahead, you ought to be able to set up with all the gear you need, without using too much power/making too much heat.

Start with one big Linux server. Equip it with a ridiculous amount of RAID storage: how about 3 or 4 80 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration; that's 160 GB or 240 GB right there. Use a 2-processor SMP Socket A motherboard, and a couple of Athlon MP chips. (When the .13 micron version of the Athlon MP comes out, you can get a speed boost and a heat reduction in one go, so I'd get the cheapest Athlon MP chips available.) With that amount of CPU horsepower you can do Linux software RAID for free (just make sure each IDE drive has its own controller, i.e. only one drive per cable) and still have lots of power left over for running server software.

Now I assume you want some number of other computers for various purposes. At a minimum you want one firewall. If you want a server exposed to the net you really want two firewalls, with the net server behind one and your really big Linux server behind both firewalls (and the second one should be really locked down!). For these extra computers, you ought to look at using the Shuttle SV24 [shuttleonline.com], with a VIA C3 [via.com.tw] chip. The SV24 has little expansion capability, so it only has a little power supply, so it only makes a little heat. The C3 dissipates about as much power as a night light ( 7 Watts) typical and 11 Watts max according to the Via web site. You don't even need a fan on the heatsink: a simple passive heatsink is enough for a C3! For firewall use, put an extra net card in the single PCI slot on the SV24.

Because Linux can boot off a floppy (try that with Windows XP Professional Server sometime) you can set up the SV24 boxes with just a floppy and a whole lot of memory. If you can get a net boot working with the built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, you don't even need the floppy.

Of course your personal workstation/gaming boxes can run hot with fast CPUs and fast 3D graphics cards and such, but those probably won't be in the server room!

Unless you are planning to invest in a render farm or Beowulf cluster, you should be able to get everything you need running, and it shouldn't get too hot.

steveha

Self Contained

Liebert maked a self-contained rack with built in air conditioning and UPS. Details here [liebert.com].

Heat, Dust & Noise

Heat
Unless the room is broom-closet sized, or you got a lot of equipment (more than 5 or 6 Athlon /p4 servers), the equipment can probably survive without active room cooling. Internal cooling of the cabinets may have to be beefed up, especially multi harddisk systems (cheap to do though).

Perhaps some creativity may help too. Perhaps some of the systems doesn't need to run 24/7.
Some BIOS's have an internal timer and calender, so you can shutdown the systems when likely not in use.
WoL (Wake on LAN) to remote boot, suspend or shutdown systems can be nice too (almost all nics and mobos support WoL nowadays).
Hook it up with some X10 gadgets and a sensor, so that the system(s) boot, if you go near your bedroom console at night, or you alarm clock goes of in the morning, or if you start your coffe machine after 2 o'clock in the night, or...

Other power management features may be present in the OS, so you can suspend the entire system, or just the harddisks, by a cron /at jobs.
Not only will you save some money, but the room will run cooler too.
And unless you run your own DNS, mailserver, etc, then a shut down firewall /router at night, is probably the safest firewall you can get;-)

Dust
This is my nemesis at the moment, our server room is in a basement, with an untreated cement floor.
I suspect our DAT and some other stuff, died because of the cement dust (ok, so DATs always break down after a short while, but..). Anyway, fans and PSU's seems like dustmagnets, which again leads to worse internal component cooling, so a clean room, without carpets is my recommendation.

Noise
All your equipment will make an infernal noise, and a generally bad indoor clima in the room. Of course, people have very individual sensitivity to this, but personally I prefer to hack outside the serverroom.

I final note, if you run a Linux box, then I can only recommend netsaint, from www.netsaint.org.
It is a very flexible, very reliable monitoring system. Since it checks services with plugins, it is easely extensible to include eg. room temperature measurement. Netsaint is simply the best of the pack.

Oh, a minor thing more; we have never regrettet our small investment in a handheld labeling machine. A small label saying "Cross-over" on a Cat cable or "UPS" on a power cord, saves a lot of trouble.

Your Furnance - The biggest computer fan ever

Well you have a furnace don't you. I have a fairly spacieous and well sealed furnace room. In your instance take advantage of that.

Go to Home Depot get a register T and insert it into the cold air intake coming into the room. Add a booster fan ( be sure that is sucking air down and not blowing it up, its a cool idea to suck all that warm air out... its also a cool idea to keep that furnace with enough oxygen so it doesnt' go and kill you with carbon monoxide.)I left the remainder of the intake pipe going back down to the furnace so I was simply tapping into the air supply and not diverting the entire flow.

Next create a simple register system that blows down on the back of the systems, get some straight register pieces and some elbows, its just like connecting straws together. The furnace should easiely handle the excess heat ever time it kicks in. You can also throw in a standard thermostat in and set the furnace fan to summer mode, so it will kick in whenever the temp goes above a certian tempature.

Now you could also go a step further and encase the systems into a sealed box ( essentially we thought about getting some plywood and making like a small sealed shed in my furnace room, and then forcing the air out with a second fan that would runn the air directly to the air intake of the furnace.) The only warning is don't try and force the exhausted air out through the chimmney for the furnace... why you ask.. because you don't wanna mess it up and again...and say, flood your house with deadly generally unnoticable furnace exhaust.

and then attatching a standard register booster fan to my incoming air chimmey ( which anyone with a furnace will have its required by law, although i don't know if modifying it is legal.. :] ). An

false flooring

One thing I haven't seen mentioned that I saw when I worked at IBM was to use a false floor. If you raise the floor 6-12 inches on a simple framework, and use removeable tiles, you can run cables and cords from anywhere to anywhere and not worry about tripping.

In fact, they not only used this technique in their server farms, but also in the production line. When they added on to the line, they dug a 8-foot hole, and then built scaffolding and a false floor. All the plumbing and wiring run under it.

Have ideas & professional experience

First, let me start with where I have experience on such things. I got my professional entry into the computer world by working with specialized computerized HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) equipment. The company I worked at was quite large (Fortune 100 company), and had facilities all across the US. All of these are computer controlled for environmental concerns. In particular, the computer rooms had the highest priority of anything. I was responsible for over 600 server rooms and worked with HVAC, electricians, code inspectors and fire marshalls on a daily basis. I dealt with practical problems of the design and support of such rooms for a living. Thus, I hopefully know what I'm talking about.

There are two primary issues that you need to be concerned about - heat removal and electricity. Both of these should be designed into consideration for the room to begin with. Since your building the house, you have an opportunity to deal with these properly to begin with. This should save you thousands of dollars vs trying to hodgepodge things together after the fact.

The first consideration is to make sure that you have an ample supply of electricity to the room. This involves more than just having a bunch of outlets all over the place. The first thing that you MUST do is to have adequate gauge electrical wire running to the room from your circuit box (make sure circuit breakers are adeqaute as well). If this isn't adequate, you won't pass inspection. You can't use the same gauge wire that you can get away in the rest of the house. You need a lower number gauge, and more of it. The primary consequences of failing to do this will be an inability to run everything at once without tripping a circuit breaker. I recommend having at least two dedicated runs of wire to the server room. Make sure their breakers are labeled and control nothing else. Also have a dedicated smoke detector hardwired for this room (the insurance company will like / require this and it will help for your safety as well.

There are also code issues here. If the wiring is inadequate and your house burns down from this (circuit breakers can fail to trip) your insurance company won't pay you a dime. If the electrician tells you not to worry about this, things will be fine, tell him to do it anyways. Follow up on this by physically verifying that the gauge is different. Remember the electrician who does your house is judging by the standard of what the typical urban household needs. It is important to remind him that this is not the typical urban house. If done during construction the cost will be minimal, if done after construction (drywall) the cost will be thousands of dollars. Also consider having one or two 220 volt outlets installed during this time. If you need to install a room air conditioner for your server room you'll need this. You'll also likely want a single heavy duty UPS for all of the equipment vs several smaller ones. Such a UPS will also require 220 Volt power. All of this will probably not add more than $200 if it is done before drywall goes up and while the electrician is on site anyways. One other thought here, make sure said wire gauge differences are documented and signed by the electrician, and then videotape everything before the drywall goes up.

Now that you have power in place you'll want to examine heat removal issues. If you put this in a basement, it will naturally be about 10f cooler. This can be used to your advantage. Keeping this room in the center of the house will also help keep it cooler / warmer for less costs. Keep in mind that the standard home AC unit will not be sufficient to cool such a room. Talk to the HVAC contractor and start by getting dedicated ducts that go to this room only (not a feed from another duct). Tell them what the room while be used for and they can help out, it's something that is pretty common for any contractor that also does commercial work (avoid HVAC contractors that only do residential work like the plague). It will also help if the room has a higher than average ceiling (give the heat somewhere to go) and a ceiling fan to help pull hot air up. You also want to keep the run (length of duct from AC unit to room) as absolutely short as you can get away with.

Consider getting a purpose built building interior air conditioner for the room. They cost about a grand, but don't have to have dedicated ductwork available to them. They are also far cheaper than failed components if you get a sudden hot day that overwhelms your air conditioner. Remember that standard air conditioners are sized to handle not the hottest days in your locality but a point that is 85% - 90% equivalent to the hottest days (there are good reasons for this, but I'd be getting off topic). In other words, don't count on the home AC to handle this room. It's not just a matter of being comfortable, it's a matter of avoiding replacing failed hardware that got too warm. This always ends up costing more than it would cost to do it right in the first place.

Now you can deal with the smaller issues. Make sure you have lots and lots of 4 bang outlets. Also make sure that you have indirect lighting in the room. It may be worthwhile to install some foam for noise absorption while your at it. It's not very expensive and it can make a big difference. You also want to make sure the floor is wood, tile or concrete. Avoid carpet that can create static electricity. Make sure you have your wiring coming to the room through PVC or steel conduit. Make sure the access point isn't going to be blocked. From here I would advise to go ahead and buy a rack. It will save lots of space, the standard is there for many things, and it will make things look much nicer. You can also set up a proper patch panel this way.

Just my 2 and a half cents worth, would add more but this is long as is.

Insulate the rest of your house

Unless I am mistaken you said you live in Canada. The land of ice and snow (according to what I am told). Why are you worried about your computers overheating? Spend the extra $$ you are thinking about for cooling your computers on EXTRA insulation for the rest of the house!!! The $$ saved over the life of the house will pay off big time and you will help the environment by spending less fossil fuels on heating and cooling. Also, invest in spending $$ on computers the produce less heat, and use less power. Use less monitors, and KVM switches. Your 100 watt 21" monitor uses tons more power and produces tons more heat than that 5 watt Athlon. If they must produce heat, have it use the heat for good. The suggestions of using the heat to feed the inlets on the heaters is VERY GOOD. The thoughts of cooling using underground water reservoirs is one of the CHEAPEST CLEANEST methods of cooling the whole house around. If you spend the $$ on an energy efficient house now, while it is cheap, you will be much happier in the long run.

Smell?

Hum, i'm a poor boy and have only 1 room for me and all my computers, so i'm running 4 computers in my room, i don't care about the noise, but sometimes when i haven't openend a window for a day or so you can smell the computers (electrostatic smell i think :) it doesn't smell that nice, sou i wouldn't heat the other rooms with the hot air from your server room!

Location of the cabling runs

Another point to consider for home server rooms which are not in a basement, is to run all cables up the wall closest to the center of the house - this gives you maximum room when crawling around the ceiling.

So when you are running new cables, or tracing faults or whatever, you aren't cramped down by the pitch of the roof.

I've done this, and while it is *never* fun stuffing around with cables in a roof space, at least if its in the center of the house you can stand up and stretch.

regards,

Duncan

STEN shelving units

If you're on a limited budget (as most people are when putting together home data centers) I highly recommend the STEN shelving units from Ikea [www.ikea.ca]. These are designed for workshop shelves, but they make excellent low-end computer racks. They're available in full and half sizes, and you can expand your rack horizontally by bolting them together (which is accomplished very easily using the included hardware). They're just the right size and shape for computer equipment, and since they're made of wood, you can easily screw things into the posts - such as power strips, small hubs, etc.

I've got a setup like this in my basement and it's very nice -- attractive and functional.

be prepared

Don't forget all of the things that add complexity to the situation.

1. Problems already discussed: heat, electricity, noise.
2. Electrostatic discharge. Ground all your equipment properly.
3. Flood. Keep your servers a few inches off the floor for minor incidents. Keep a backup somewhere on higher ground for major incidents.
4. Earthquakes, tornadoes. Keep your server in a position where it cannot fall over or hit the ground over if it tips. Consider buying a solid steel case to potential minimize crush damage.
5. Kids. Get a door with a lock to keep kids from endangering themselves in your server room.
6. Sanity. Get a network connection from your server room to some other location or locations in your house. At this location, put your main workstation, from which you can access all your servers remotely. That way you won't be stuck in the server room for too long.

Pollution

If I was moving into a brand new house, and was looking to build a server farm properly, I'd be ready - this is one of my favourite "What would you do if you won the Lottery?" answers, and I've spent a lot of time planning it.

After looking at the server farm in work I figured the first thing to decide is "What the heck is all that stuff going to sound like in my house? It's pretty noisy at work, and the walls are made of breeze block and concrete. I can hear a motor hum through the wall when there's no other noise. In my house, after about 10:30pm there's no noise at all, it's silent. If I leave my desktop PC on overnight you can hear it.

I'd certainly soundproof the walls, and if money was no object, I'd add insulation to keep the heat out. I'd then look at some kind of system to pull dust and fibles out of the air before they reached the equipment. We have an extraction system with filters that are regularly cleaned. Houses get pretty dusty, with the resultant build up all adding to the build up of heat.

I reckon you'd want to sort all that before you started with the actual ecuipment.

Lego-based heat control

I guess, if I did feel some perverse need for a server room, this is how I'd do it:

Buy a used Lego Mindstorms set.

Build a temerature sensor for the set. (Basically, just buy a thermistor from radioshack and hook it to a Lego sensor wire - it works like a light sensor.

Build a lego robot that can open the window a crack when the temp. sensor detects a temp above a certain limit. Voila. Plus, this way you get the geek-out factor.

Re:Natural cooling (geothermal)

Check out geothermal cooling [doe.gov]. Dig about 5 - 7 feet down into the ground and you've got a consistent temperature *year 'round*. The temperature happens to be ideal for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.

It'd be *ultra geek* if you could set up a processor cooler based on this technology.

Re:Natural cooling (geothermal)

Yah, but PC's arent designed to be earth-cooled :-). You'd have to dig a really long (or deep) shaft to get enough air-to-earth heat transfer area to keep up with the heat output of the PC's. Too short and eventually (perhaps quickly) the air from the room will elevate the temperature of the exposed surfaces, outstripping the thermal conductivity of the earth and baking the equipment.

The exhaust fan sounds better to me -- most equipment is designed to be air-cooled in a cool-room-temp environment, so dragging the house-air through the room makes sense.

If you want to get really wild -- insulate the interior walls and cut a window, then mount a window air conditioner across the interior wall to pump heat from the server room into the house proper, recycling instead of dumping.

Re:Natural cooling (geothermal)

Ummm, you don't bury the computers, you bury about a mile of poly tubing, and circulate a water / glycol mix. Hook that up to an old AC core (or a new one, it's your money...) and you
have yourself a basic heat transfer system. Add a compressor and you have a heat pump. Big project, and expensive (cost of digging deep enough and tubing). If you heat / cool you whole house this way, it may pay for itself.

What I did for my room, was add a few electic dampers, duct blowers, thermostats, and a few relays and you have yourself a REALLY simple climate conrtol system.

You have 4 ducts: exhaust to outside, fresh outside air (filtered), furnace (a/c), and furnace return. Use thermostats to control which ducts are active based on temps inside, outside, etc.

When it's cold outside, you have free AC. When it's warm, you tap off the main house AC. Dual zone control on furnaces are common. I don't care how cold it gets in the room, so heating isn't required (it doesn't get below 30 outside here, and the server room. You can't actually recycle the waste heat as the room is ALWAYS cooler than I normally keep the rest of the house.

I actually have a new modern furnace and A/C that can run at 3 different levels which works awesome for this project. I also have an electronic air cleaner, and run the blower 24/7/365 filtering the house air (allergies...)