Air Con for Server Room : Recommendations?

[fiza]

Currently we have an air con unit in the Server room which is really a little section of a room off an IT Room. The room has an air con unit which is the same as air con in the IT Rooms and is controlled centrally by the Premises Team. The unit struggles when temperatures rise and I am worried that we need a better air con system for the server room. The room has 3 racks, 1 for Core switching and 2 for servers.

Any recommendations of brands and suppliers to approach for this?

[dhicks]

Any recommendations of brands and suppliers to approach for this?

 

We seem to be getting on okay with a Daikin unit fitted and serviced twice a year by AirTech. Daikin tend to be one of the more expensive brands but seem to be well-regarded when it comes to reliable devices that need to run 24 hours, rather than on/off units for home comfort cooling.

 

If you want a cheaper option, then we have a floor-standing unit from Argos as a back up. It actually handles the load quite well, and when our previous wall-mount unit conked out it stood in for several weeks until we got a new unit sorted. The fiddly part from our point of view was dealing with the exhaust air and water (we had to duct-tape up the air outlet to the window and have buckets swapped around to drain the water), but if you're somewhere you can drill a couple of holes in an external wall to lead stuff away they actually work surprisingly well.

[kearton]

*Many* years ago I found an interesting website which explained how to calculate exactly how many British Thermal Units of cooling you needed for a given room, given the size, all the equipment in it, lighting, external windows (and direction they face), etc. I've managed to find an old spreadsheet that i made from the info (I didn't want to guestimate because the server rooms I inherited were well under-cooled...)

[ITGURU]

Get 2 for redundancy, we've always had Fujitsu or Mitsubishi units and been trouble free. Used to have LG but troublesome.

Air con suppliers made recommendation as to unit capacities.

[smarties11]

Agree with ITGURU, get two for redundancy, wired into a controller on redundancy so that the units alternate each day (and the second unit kicks in if first unit fails or can't maintain temperature). You can try and justify the cost by explaining to your HT that two units running only 50% of the time *should* last as long as a single unit running 100% of the time. I think we paid about £6k for two units and a controller, this was after our previous unit failed when we were in Nottingham spending time with my FIL who had just had a major operation for terminal cancer, to extend his life. I had to remotely shut everything down, and then arrange a hire company to deliver a decent portable unit ready for 6am on the Monday morning so I could start everything back up again. Trust me, you don't want your aircon failing - it could be at the worst possible time as I discovered!

[matty-normy]

I can agree with this as ours failed last week in the high temperatures overnight with no one on site. Only to be fixed then next day and fail again and a portable unit also brought in failing overnight! So to have the two units gives you the best chance if things do take a turn for the worst.

[MatthewL]

I've always engaged with the local air con company and let them spec things up, never actually picked what I wanted before just had a number of quotes and gone form there.

[DaveTheTech]

We found out that our server room was under spec'd.

TBF it was probably fine for 10 years ago. But adding a server, a SAN and a much beefier core switch soon took up the extra capacity.

 

Come summer time the AC worked over time and boiled itself dry. That was great walking in and hitting that wall of warm air.

 

Always wandered how they calculated it - turns out its a bit more complex than "find the capacity of the room and how many servers there are"

https://www.tombling.com/cooling/heat-load-calculations.htm