Ideal Server Room Temperature

[PaulRenda]

Hello all,

 

Can anyone indicate where I can get information of the 'ideal room temperature' for a closed server room (servers, comms cabinet, etc.)?

 

I've been having this discussion with my BM, where he refuses to set aircon below 21 degrees, which I find extremely hot for a room that only contains equipment. To my knowledge 21 degrees is ideal working temperature for us, but the cooler the best for machines. Am I wrong to think this?

 

All pointers are very much appreciated.

 

Thank you

Paul

[twin--turbo]

we run about 19/20ish

 

Stupidly our M&E company installed an air extract in the room too so our cool air is being sucked out.. We need to rectify that ( Gaffa Tape)

 

Rob

[rich_tech]

our air con is set at 18 celsius in our server room (it is a large server room where the equipment is at the opposite end to the air con unit, no issues though with overheating at all for us.

[DavidIrwin]

Paul,

This will depend on the equipment you have running in the room, but having a target "cold aisle" temperature between 19-24 is normally fine. If you have temperature monitoring in your servers and other equipment look at what the various temperatures report. Thanks to Google and others more modern servers are designed to be able to work at slightly higher temperatures as this reduces the cost of aircon. Looking at the CPU and Output temperatures and the working range specifications of your servers, etc will allow you to judge whether you need anything as low as 19deg.

 

Dave

[mrbios]

21oC minimum, anything lower is an uncomfortable working temperature, obviously if you have a room packed to the brim with servers (and if you do i say get the hell into virtualisation ) then you may wany lower but personally with a small server room and relatively few servers 21oC is a minimum.

[DavidIrwin]

Good point @mrbios I should have noted that all of my comments above assume that your server room is not also your workshop, technicians room or office!

 

Dave

[PaulRenda]

Thanks for all your help guys, it is very much appreciated.

 

PS: Fortunately it no longer is our working room, we now have a decent office.

[plexer]

As has bee said above I tend to work on maintaining the temp wether it's 19 20 21 or 22 that's as important.

 

Ben

[nicholab]

Has any one set their server room out with a hot and a cold aisle?

[theriver]

The big boys are experimenting with warmer server rooms:

 

Temperature · Google Data Centers

 

Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature » Data Center Knowledge

[sidewinder]

Has any one set their server room out with a hot and a cold aisle?

 

I wish I had room for an aisle of any description! Then again I only have one cab worth of equipment

 

Usually keep mine at between 19-21 degrees

[Soulfish]

Our server room is arranged in a hot isle/cold isle format, but we don't have the full containment between the two. It's just setup so that cold air from the chillers arrives at the front of the racks, with the hot air being dumped out the back where it's then extracted from the room .

 

Room temp is kept at around 20-21 with around 50% humidity

[dhicks]

To my knowledge 21 degrees is ideal working temperature for us, but the cooler the best for machines. Am I wrong to think this?

 

Our server cupboard has been running at around 27 degrees celcius or higher most of the summer - ideally it would be lower, but the weedy portable airconditioner from Argos can only deal with so much. We have a variey of hardware of various ages in a quite densly populated rack in that room, and reliability seems okay as far as I can tell - no excess of disk failures or similar (I'm now expecting to get in tomorrow to find the file server a smoldering pile of melted metal...). We'll be getting a proper air conditioning unit in at some point soon (hopefully), at which point we'll set the room temperature a bit lower - probably 21 or so. I'm not sure what the humidity of the room is like, but I'm guessing quite high - we've now blown two light fittings as water has leaked through the ceiling from above.

Edited September 5, 2012 by dhicks

[Sylv3r]

We have ours set to run at 21, anything over 26 and my Climate Monitor starts to complain and alert me.

[twin--turbo]

Bizarrely..

 

I visited a client last Tuesday who's office is his server room and it being a warm day we commented on the lovely coolness, I said it's gr8 until it goes off and you can hear the servers from the front door. "It's never been off in 7 years" He said. We finished our tests, finished our coffee and said farewell.

 

Wednseday morning we were called to fix a network fault, when we arrived his office was like a sauna and very noisy!! Quite by 100% Chance the A/C failed over night and when he went in the front door of the office the noise allerted him to the fault. Needless to say we denied all knowledge of being bringers of BAD LUCK. We sorted "OUR" problem in the rather uneasy heat, and worked round a confused A/C engineer.

 

We returned today to finalize our works, the room was cool again. The fault had been a ceiling cassette in an office on the far side of the building that was leaking gas!!

 

Rob

[Out_of_Sync]

My aircon is set to 20 degrees, the room is about 20m². I just got a small thermometer in the room yesterday. Room temp. is at 21.5 degrees and the server are showing a good 10 degrees hotter than the room temp. The room is both office and server room.

[dhicks]

reliability seems okay as far as I can tell - no excess of disk failures or similar (I'm now expecting to get in tomorrow to find the file server a smoldering pile of melted metal...)

 

My mistake, it was of course the Internet gateway device that conked out...

[Deanuk]

16 degrees 24/7