JWSmythe's Journal: Building a server room

So I had an idea....

    That's usually the first line I say, when my friends roll their eyes, start throwing weird comments out, or get ready to walk out of the room. :)

    This one isn't bad though.

    We were looking at the prospect of building our own server room. Leasing space in a facility and paying for bandwidth is expensive. Really expensive.

    I know of two providers locally, one is Verizon FiOS business. Their cost for 20Mb/20Mb, with a whole bunch of IP's is about $200/mo. The other would be something closer to $1000/mo. Still, it's cheaper than the facilities, usually at $85 to $200 per Mb/s at 95th percentile, plus floor space, cabinet, power, port charges, etc.

    I'm putting together numbers right now on how to do it. Getting the bandwidth in is the easy part. Putting the room together is the hard part.

    My "office" at home usually has at least 3 machines and two monitors running in it. With the normal air conditioning, even if I tweak the A/C vents throughout the house, gets to 90 degrees or so pretty easily. Fans blowing the hot air into the rest of the house can usually bring it down to about 85 degrees. So, I have to cool it with an extra air conditioner. I bought a nice portable air conditioner from Home Depot a few years ago, and it's really helped through the summers. In the winter, leaving the window cracked is all I need to keep the room comfortable.

    That's just 5 pieces of equipment though. What happens when you want to move a couple dozen machines into a space like that? Either you live with the overheating, and babysit crashing machines all the time, or you cool it.

    So this idea will reside in a garage. I'm considering building a cube, 8'x8'x8', raised off the floor 1' to 2' (I have to measure the ceiling height). Two decent window air conditioners will be overkill, but that's (one of) my middle names.

    In time, it will have a couple (or few) Xantrax power inverter/chargers, a bank of batteries, automatic gas powered generator, solar panels to charge during the day, etc. We'll even consider putting in badge access for the door, and a halon fire suppression system. :)

    Really, if the cost goes down to 10% of the original cost, that leaves a good profit margin in a "facility" where everyone lives literally in the facility or a few blocks away. It's one thing to have "someone" on call or on staff, but having the best and most familiar people there is a very good thing.

    An 8x8 room should give us plenty of room to grow, and since we'd be building it as a free standing room inside the garage, it would be available for expansion as needed. If it got to the point where it was too big for the space, then it would be cost effective to redo it in a commercial space near by. Pretty much, if we stuffed it with servers, we'd already be making good money, or at least so I'd hope :)

    I'm still working on the idea.

Sounds familiar

[nizo]

I am planning on turning the front office into a computer friendly room :-) Already have electricity to the room to allow for (2) 15amp circuits and (1) 20amp circuit. Planning on putting in a dedicated AC unit.

Not sure where you live, but having extra cooling? Beats having your single AC unit fail; things can get really hot really quick when that happens. And boy do harddrives hate heat (as you mentioned). Spending a little on temperature monitoring (with alarm) is also well worth it, unless you plan on sl

Re:

[JWSmythe]

Where we're going to put it is right by the breaker box, so we're good for power circuits. I can run whatever I want, and have an electrician verify I didn't screw up. :)

I'm in Florida. I don't know if I mentioned it in the original, but I planned two window units to start, ducted into the room. Each would have enough capacity to cool the whole thing. When it's ramped up as a fully functional facility, we can look at getting a couple small 2 ton package units, and run one with the other

Generating less heat...

[Alioth]

If your workloads aren't too CPU intensive, it might be worth considering something by VIA which chucks out less heat. Some of their chips maxed out consume less power than most Intel/AMD space heaters do when idling.

Re:

[JWSmythe]

Actually, I was thinking about that. Unfortunately, most of the machines are beaten on pretty hard.

I found a vendor for a clue little (VERY little) box, that draws about 3 watts, and runs off a CF card, and doesn't even have a CPU fan.

Unfortunately, most of it is processor intensive, and I'm not going to be able to change most of them away from their current platforms. I have two heavily beaten on Linux machines, and most of the rest are other folks Windows box

Why raise the floor?

[jea6]

We moved out of a raised floor data center (Exodus/C&W/Savvis) to a concrete slab & conduit tray facility (Equinix). I was told that having concrete slab reduced the cooling needs and lowered the cost associated with building the raised floor.

Re:

[JWSmythe]

It's for the "oh shit" factor.

I'm building out in a garage, and there is a water heater about 8' from where we intend to build. That in itself *should* be fine, as most garages slope outwards slightly. As I found in my own garage, that slightly doesn't always count for much. When my water heater blew (and blew, and blew), there was about 2" of water standing at the inside of my garage, and no water went outside on it's own.

Beyond that, if (if, if, if) there's