Hi all
Currently speccing up our new server room and just wondered what sort of floor I should be going for? :? Dont like the carpet tiles - because they just suck and eventually start to smell (aka current server room). Raised floor seems a bit prohibitive cost wise. I think the white shiny floors look good, but not sure what material it is.
What do you put down in your server room?
ours is standard puke green crappidy school carpet... the really hard wearing stuff.
However, the room that has the servers in has one of those plastic vinyl floors... or whatever it is made out of. Not that the servers are on it... we have a big industrial shelving unit for them!
why dont you go for carpet tiles, that way when you spill coffee all over the server and floor you can at least lift the tile to wash
I would lay carpet, and have the server rack mounted.
need any tips on what colour to paint the wall?
Linoleum is what I got for ours as it does not create excess static and does not get filled up with dust and other rubbish. It is also far less likely to catch fire if there is a nasty hardware failure with the high voltage equipment.
If you want to get caught up in the Cisco recommendations then it should also have its door opening outwards for a quick exit and should not have a drop ceiling.
I once met a guy on a course who used to work in Industry. He was shocked and appalled that all schools didn't have server rooms with raised floors and pressurised inside.
Yep, Linoleum. I just went and asked our site officer what it was called. I'ts very hard wearing, cleans easy and quick to put down.
Perhaps a mattress for those late nights as well.
We have carpet but I am desperately trying to work out the best way to get rid of it. Because we have a hatch ou to the roof the floor often gets dirty and has to wait to dry before it gets hoovered ...
A major source of dust and dirt!
Ooops, our server room has got a suspended ceiling...and by door that opens outwards do you mean a fire door/exit ?Originally Posted by SYNACK
did you get a quote for a raised floor, out of interest how much was it ?Hi all
Currently speccing up our new server room and just wondered what sort of floor I should be going for? :? Dont like the carpet tiles - because they just suck and eventually start to smell (aka current server room). Raised floor seems a bit prohibitive cost wise. I think the white shiny floors look good, but not sure what material it is.
What do you put down in your server room?
While raised floors are all well and good for large server rooms and datacenters, they're overkill for schools, prohibitively expensive to retrofit
and difficult to justify even in a new build. In addition you'd need large and expensive CRAC units to deliver cooling through the floor. Overhead cabling and comfort cooling is just fine for server rooms of up to 4 racks so long as they're not chock full of blades.
As for you're floor, yes the carpet tiles get smelly, and screws and things can be lost forever if you've got dark coloured tiles. So go for the lino option.
Just means that the doorway into the server room should swing outwards from the room. Not 100% sure why but being a cisco guideline it is probably there just in case you catch fire and have to run out of the room or something. I think it was also so no one barged in and hit you with the door if you were near it.Ooops, our server room has got a suspended ceiling...and by door that opens outwards do you mean a fire door/exit ?
The drop ceilings are more easily justified as it reduces amount of air space in the room and in some cases those drop ceilings hide the fact that the walls don't go all the way up. This means that the server room can leak noise, expensively air conditioned air or fire into the next room over quite easily.
Our server room actually also has a drop ceiling but the walls go all the way to the real ceiling above so I'm ok with it.
Thanks guys - the linoneum stuff looks like what I'm after, I think it was this stuff they had down in the last place I worked at but didnt know what it was
Torledo, don't quite recall the exact figures but the cost for a raised floor even in a new build was out of this world 8O
I have sparkley anti-slip industrial strength catering grade vinyl down on mine, its probably anti-static as well, I know the IT room carpets are anti-static tiles at something like £80 of a box of 20!!
The floor is raised up a good foot from the rooms around it so they can flood nicely and I would hope someone would have noticed by that point that the IT Centre was starting to swim in water before I needed to look into moving out of the server room.
we've got floorboards in ours suspended on 2by4 joists.. its reasonably effective.
Kyle
One side if the wall goes all the way up, the other doesn't but then that's the point of the design of our building, to have a large suspended ceiling void spanning corriders and rooms. we are a small building but have extensive air conditioning, fire and security, lighting and air extraction which were relatively straightforward to install because of the large ceiling void, it also hides a multitude of sins.Ooops, our server room has got a suspended ceiling...and by door that opens outwards do you mean a fire door/exit ?
The drop ceilings are more easily justified as it reduces amount of air space in the room and in some cases those drop ceilings hide the fact that the walls don't go all the way up. This means that the server room can leak noise, expensively air conditioned air or fire into the next room over quite easily.
Our server room actually also has a drop ceiling but the walls go all the way to the real ceiling above so I'm ok with it.
I suspected there could be some fire safety reasons so we may have to look into getting a (real) firewall (i know its in the cabling standards for the demarc /comms room and so our main switching room has a firewall even though it's had to huge holes bored into it to route cat5 cabling) so I'll have to look into whether we'll need one for the server room.
I expect there to be minimal leakage of conditioned air and noise from the server room, although there's noone next to our room, merely a corridor.
A low ceiling does mean the room gets hot very quickly, but on the flip side t means their is also a ready made plenum for removing hot exhaust air.
So up to a certain number of servers and equipment a ceiling tile mounted heat extractor fan is the only thing required to keep the room temperature in check. We still use an A/C unit because we've got a lot of servers.
Our room is actually more efficient than a high ceilinged room without raised floor cooling. Because the conditioned air is more targeted, blowing down at a 45 degree angle from the centre of the room with the front of the racks located in the air path. And the air extraction fans mounted directly behind the racks sucking the exhust immediately as it rises because there's minimum distance between the equipment and tile-mounted fan.
Ofcourse our setup is nowhere near as efficient as raise floor cooling with CRAC units, because while we've tried to direct the air to the racks, it's very rudimentary. Not all of the air goes to cool the servers whereas with a raised floor you can direct airflow and even control the amount of air you send to each rack using grills in the ceiling tiles where they are optimally located. But then again I haven't got $200,000+ to spend on raised floor, CRAC unit, gas extinguishing system or anything 'datacenter' other than racks and cable routing.
You should really have a firewall round all corridors - or for instance, above fire doors so areas become zones.
I'd recommend you got one installed - especially in a server room - if you get a fire in that void it'll be through the building in minutes.
As for boring holes through, you can always fill the gaps up with fire retardent expanding form.
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