Super-Networking Blog

One problem that anyone who runs a server room or a datacenter has come across is how do I keep it cool. Servers put off a ton of heat, now with the popularity of 1U servers and Blade Servers the heat problem has only gotten worse.

The best way to keep a datacenter cool is to design it correctly in the beginning. Get large enough A/C units, calculate the amount of heat being put off by your equipment. Have professional cooling technicians come in and design the perfect solution. That is fine if you are designing a brand new datacenter but what do you do if you have an old datacenter that has grown beyond its cooling capability.

First off you should do what you can to direct the hot and cool air in your server room/datacenter. You should try to setup cool rows and hot rows, you don’t want to be kicking hot air from one rack into the intakes of servers in another rack. Always exhaust hot air away from all other equipment.

Next do not cool the hot air directly. It is very common to put a cold air outlet vent right over the exhaust side of your server racks. You are trying to cool the hot air before it gets to the rest of the room. The problem with this is it isn’t very efficient. The better way to cool your datacenter is to vent the cold air into the space the server intakes are drawing from. You then want to put your A/C unit’s hot air intakes right above your rack’s exhaust side. What you are doing here is sucking as much of the hot air as you can out of the room as soon as it comes out of the rack, you are then putting the cool air in place for the servers to take it in. This works well because you are cooling the ambient temperature of the room and getting rid of the hot air instead of wasting all your energy cooling really hot air. Also with the servers pulling in colder air the servers should stay cooler even if the hot rows warm up a lot.

Try it out, it works quite well when you are on a tight budget.