Server room floor

[Oops_my_bad]

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?

[Joanne]

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!

[PEO]

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?

[SYNACK]

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.

[mrforgetful]

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.

[ninjabeaver]

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.

[GrumbleDook]

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!

[torledo]

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.

 

Ooops, our server room has got a suspended ceiling...and by door that opens outwards do you mean a fire door/exit ?

[torledo]

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?

 

did you get a quote for a raised floor, out of interest how much was it ?

 

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.

[SYNACK]

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.

 

Ooops, our server room has got a suspended ceiling...and by door that opens outwards do you mean a fire door/exit ?

 

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.

 

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.

[Oops_my_bad]

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

[john]

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.

[kylewilliamson]

we've got floorboards in ours suspended on 2by4 joists.. its reasonably effective.

 

Kyle

[torledo]

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

[kylewilliamson]

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.

[TronXP]

At the last place I worked, we got broken into, and the thiefs lifted up the ceiliing tiles outside the server room and our office. We were told by police that they often do this as the lowered ceilings sometimes hide walls that don't go to ceiling hight and the theifs crawl through these gaps to get into locked rooms. Thank god our rooms were alright we had just taken delievry of 150 dell laptops.

[torledo]

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.

 

Having loooked again, I was wrong the wall does goe up to the ceiling...it's just there are wooden joists and metal cable trays going across. Hence there are some small gaps. Obviously the wooden joists are holding up the ceiling but are they not a fire hazard aswell as they stretch over adjoning areas ? We have a lot of open plan areas, so we don't have any corridors in the traditional sense more like walkways, all the rooms have walls going up to the ceiling but as I've said there's cable trays, ventilation ducting and joists going across so very little of it is completely airtight.

 

As for the holes I mentioned they are 100mm wide but do have cat5 cabling running through them so the gaps are small i.e nothing airtight...do i still need the foam.

 

As for the story of thieves crawling through the drop ceiling...I'd like them try in any of the rooms in our place....The drop ceiling void is tight as f***

mainly because of an ancient, disused ventilation system running through.

[SYNACK]

You can only go so far fireproofing in a standard building. Smaller gaps mean a that it should take longer for any fire to spread as it mus first burn through the walls to get to the rooms or corridors next to it. It is always just a effort to slow it down though. To stop it you would need a more active fire protection method like gas fire suppressors.

 

As there are ventilation shafts spanning the room the fire would have a path out anyway. Because of this your setup is probably around as good as it can be.

 

- Interesting Story -

 

A while ago I heard an interesting story about a fire in a University. They had a fire in one of the main server rooms which they eventually managed to put out. About three days later another of the networking rooms across campus caught fire, then the next day another. In each instance they could not find out why the fire had started. A day later a third networking room caught fire and they figured it out.

 

The networking rooms that caught fire were all linked up to the first room with outdoor fiber. In older outdoor fiber installations the fiber cores are enclosed in an oily substance to prevent water from getting in. The fire in the first building had set fire to the oil in the fiber cable and had burnt slowly along the cable till it reached a new source of fuel.

 

This incident changed the way that outdoor fiber was produced and caused a few places to rip out their existing infrastructure.