Server Room Cooling Enterprise

In an enterprise environment, a server room requires a stable temperature, usually maintained between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 25 degrees Celsius). The ideal humidity level falls between 40 and 60 percent, which minimizes any risks associated with either condensation or static electricity. Achieving these conditions is no small feat, and it mandates not just adequate airflow and ventilation, but also a number of air conditioning systems that either cool air that is blown directly to the servers or regulate the chilled water used in the cooling system. The monitoring of key environmental conditions is equally vital, and enterprises typically set up a number of redundancies to ensure that atmospheric conditions never drift beyond the desired parameters and that no downtime occurs as a result of cooling system failure.

Server room cooling starts with efficient equipment. Room temperature within a server space should be no higher than 77°F, but ideal temperatures are closer to 70°F and may dip lower in certain high-density environments where air circulation is more likely to be restricted. This means that your CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) unit must not only have the proper capacity to handle your room's heat load but also sufficient controls to ensure proper distribution of that air throughout the space to all your equipment. Hot and cold aisle containment is the server room equivalent to a well-insulated house.

The AC prerequisites for a server room dictate keeping a reliable temperature between 64°F and 81°F (18°C to 27°C); an ideal condition relative humidity is from 40% to 60%. Two issues arise that could easily compromise these conditions. One relates to airflow. The more equipment you have, the more heat you have. Air needs to be moved around so that it can pick up heat from the equipment and deliver the heat to the proper places to make that equipment stay within spec. The second issue is redundancy. Redundancy is the ability to keep going when part of the system fails. "N+1" is the simplest way to achieve redundancy and is very commonly used

A typical server room has a standard temperature that falls within the range of 68°F to 77°F (20°C to 25°C). Some organizations, like ASHRAE, suggest an even wider range (64.4°F to 80.6°F or 18°C to 27°C) to account for energy-efficient equipment that doesn't necessarily conform to the old standards. Maintaining these temperatures helps ensure that the servers are performing at their best and that they are reliable.

A general guideline for determining the cooling load in a server room is to calculate 400 to 500 BTUs for every square foot of the room. This number is based on typical power and heat generation figures for the types of equipment found in a server room and is used by engineers and heat load/airflow consultants when the equipment is not specifically known. But is 400 to 500 really close? And how much variation is acceptable?

In an enterprise server room, the lowest acceptable temperature for a server is usually about 50°F (10°C). Keeping the temperature in this range keeps the IT hardware performing well and reliably, ensuring that the servers don't go down unexpectedly.

To find the appropriate cooling capacity for a server room, one must first compute the total heat load produced by the room's contents. This means considering all the equipment, lights, and people in the room. The server and its associated gear were easy: they consumed 19.5 kW, which converts to about 66,500 BTU per hour. The lights—installed in the server room's ceiling—emitted about the same amount of heat. Then there was personnel. A rough estimate of the six people in the room gave us about 3,000 BTU for them. Then, to be really safe, because we wanted reliable operation for our converted van, we guessed on the high side for the sum and selected gear with a 100,000 BTU-hour rating.

To guarantee that servers operate at peak performance and remain reliable, the temperatures in the rooms that house them should ideally not exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).

The HVAC system that is most frequently utilized in data centers is the Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) unit. This unit is purpose-built to control the temperature and humidity in a server room, maintaining them at optimal levels for efficient operation and reliable performance of the technology that lives in the room.

To typically work out the cooling requirements for a server room, one must first ascertain the total heat output in British Thermal Units (BTUs) per hour. This is done by using a rather general formula:Total BTU Requirement = (W E * 3.412) + (other stuff, like lighting, people, and odds and ends).W E is the power consumption of the server and other cooling-equipment room (in Watts). In simple terms, if you know how much power is being used, you multiply that by a number (in this case, 3.412) that converts Watts to BTUs and then add in some extra stuff that also generates heat in the server room.