Cooling and quieting the server/automation room

pgray007

Active Member
I am finally in a home I can call my own, and after stareing with pride at our "automation closet" I started loading it up wth servers, etc. Right now I have two Dell severs (2600 and 1500), a no-name PC, router, IPCop rackmount, LTO tape backup and a couple of misc. pieces of networking equipment. I also just got a new 24-port 10/100/1000 PoE switch that will handle all the ethernet that runs to the panel in the closet (which is very loud). I have all this junk since I run a smll business out of my home, and the big dell handles file, print and corp email. The other boxes host a website and run Asterisk.

All this hardware is well and good except for the fact that it is too hot to run with the door closed. When I first fired everything up and left it alone for the night, I woke up to one of the server overheat alarms going off. Even with the door closed, the fan noise is noticable and the closet opens into the kitchen/family room of an open floorplan house so it is a bit annoying not to mention tough on the WAF.

Anyone have some good ideas on how to cool everything down, and quiet it down a bit? For cooling I was thinking of putting a jump duct towards the top of the closet to let hot air out, and an additional one down low if there still was not enough cool air coming in under the door.

For quiet, the only good solution I've come up with is cutting down on hardware or moving some of it to another location in the house. The only candidates are guest closets which would have issues with network and power (there is none, so think extension cords), and the odd looks from guests when they see some rackmount server sitting on the floor. We also plan on filling these rooms with wee ones at some point, so it's not a great long term solution. The closet is standard interior drywall on the 1st floor, and the walls are not insulated. The Dell servers have been super reliable and are cheap on eBay, but boy are they LOUD.
 
There have been some good posts recently on fanless PCs. I am going to be looking at these as a possible avenue to reduce noise, heat, and power consumption.
 
I put a low-sone bathroom fan at the top of my closet, vented out. I'm putting it on a zWave outlet, and I have an Elk temp-sensor in there, so shortly i'll be able to not have it on 24x7 but rather temp-based.

I also cut a hole in the floor to pull cold air up from the basement.
 
I put a low-sone bathroom fan at the top of my closet, vented out. I'm putting it on a zWave outlet, and I have an Elk temp-sensor in there, so shortly i'll be able to not have it on 24x7 but rather temp-based.

I also cut a hole in the floor to pull cold air up from the basement.

It would be tough to vent to the outside since my closet is in the center of the house, but a low noise fan to a duct might do the trick. I also like the hole in the floor idea. I have a crawl space but I could close the vent in the summer and open in the winter. Now to get the noise down... I am thinking of trying an insulated door so I could also get a bit of additional security on the server room door. Anyone have any other ideas? I like the hardware I have (and have some big bucks in it) so I don't want to replace it with lower noise CPUs, although I think future hardware purchaces will take noise into consideration.

Are there any strange acoustical products that might help absorb some of the noise?
 
I went the same route as IVB. The fan I went with is a 1.5 sone fan and it is virtually silent. I had temp control running on it for a short period then switched it to always on. For the rest of the noise I soundproofed the closet (exterior door, insulation, MDF & drywall). I spent about $250 for the whole job. If you don't want to do the drywall work you can get some acoustic foam and line the room with it. Most of the noise is in the low frequency range and easily absorbed by the foam.

Sidenote - I am also running Dell servers and work in a data center. No major vendor makes an affordable silent/low noise server class machine. The best bet is to go for the larger cases, 5U or 7U and get an enclosed rack. The rack will muffle allot of the sound especially the ones with full metal sides. Avoid the perforated steal ones. Don't bolt it down the wheels don't transfer as much vibration.
 
For the computer noise condsider purchasing an Antec Sonata case. Newegg and Fry's have had the Sonata II's on sale for $50 including shipping (after rebate). The cases use rubber mounts for hard disk trays and fans and are very quiet. There are a few other Cocooners that use these cases as well. I also believe there is a company that makes a sound deadening kit for these (custom foam inserts and such). Also, check out Quiet PC as they have a lot of good ideas there for eliminating sound from computers.

For heat you will have to put in some type of fan to get the hot air out. Maybe consider a "louvered" door that can pull some of the cooler air inside the house. Not sure how expensive that would get though (heating and cooling wise).
 
If you have access to the crawl, you could add a remote fan like this, zero additional noise. Keep in mind, whatever air you remove from the house has to be replaced from somewhere else.

Brian
 
So, two thoughts. Neither may be of much help:

1. In anticipating this, I had the builder install a ceiling mount powered exhaust fan (similar to what most have in their bathroom)
2. I used to have a very large wine collection in my old home (1500+ bottles). Heat was not an option. I installed a temp trigger
A/C that worked perfect.

Here is a link: http://www.airconditioner.com/WINE_AIR_CONDITIONERS.asp#

I vented the unit to the garage which was on the other side of the wall.

As I said, neither may help but who knows...

- Ed
 
So, two thoughts. Neither may be of much help:

1. In anticipating this, I had the builder install a ceiling mount powered exhaust fan (similar to what most have in their bathroom)
2. I used to have a very large wine collection in my old home (1500+ bottles). Heat was not an option. I installed a temp trigger
A/C that worked perfect.

Here is a link: http://www.airconditioner.com/WINE_AIR_CONDITIONERS.asp#

I vented the unit to the garage which was on the other side of the wall.

As I said, neither may help but who knows...

- Ed
That is an interesting option if you have a place to vent it. My closet will have a ceiling mount fan, but I am woried that it still might get too hot. Any idea on the energy consumption of one of these units? And where does the condesentation plumbing run to?
 
My study PC is inside of my desk. To get rid of the heat, I water cooled it and ran the H20 lines outside of the desk to a radiator. I put the CPU / VGA / Hard drives on the system. Quiet (noiseless), and you can move the heat outside of the room.
There is a max of feet that the lines can be, dependent on the diameter of the lines and the strength of the pump. I didn't have to go far, but thought it was worth mentioning.
 
At one point I decided to quiet down all of my PCs and ordered custom low DB fans, rubber mounts, etc form QuietPC. Don't waste your money on most of the gimmicks. Replacing 80mm fans with 120mm fans is a good idea if your cases will accept them, but I still consider all of my PCs very noisy. It is like installing rubber mounts on a Mustang exaust, it just isn't going to help. If you have noisy cases with 80mm fans, a quieter case with 120s will help a lot.

I have a Dell server too, the thing sounds like a jet engine. Putting it in closets does not help, it is just soo loud. My solution is to replace the damn thing. You can use water solutions, or cooler processors like the Core 2 Duo's which are only 65w and don't need much cooling. A big help for me was just setting the power management so that everything shuts down as much as possible.

For my closet, I cut through the wall and added an intake near floor level with a couple 120mm fans pulling air into the room (Looks like a small air return, no one notices. I also make sure the lights and monitors shut off as soon as I leave the room. I tried venting to the garage, but I think when the vent fan was not running, the high pressures of the hot garage push more hot air back in the room or blew too much of my cold air into the garage.

I tapped into an air conditioner vent, which works awesome in the summer, but leaks hot air into the closet in the winter.

Bottom line is I have begun to replace all of my computers with quieter ones. NAS seems to be helping too. My File server had 12 fans in it. I now try to buy more USB and NAS drives so I do not have to put them in the computers and can really store them anywhere.... That makes the PCs cooler and need less fans. My Core 2 Duo machines do not have CPU fans and vent striaght out of the case... Is that BTX? It is a design principle to reduce noise and make cooling more efficient.

Man, it is a long painfull and sometimes expensive problem you are trying to tackle. Sometimes I think it would have been cheaper and better for me to have just built a new server room off the back of my house or something...

Vaughn
 
I too had similar issues and used the following to quite things down and cool the room:

1) I had an electrician branch expand the single light switch in the closet to hold two switches. The first one is a standard Z-wave switch that controls the closet light and turns on the light when I open the closet door (magnetic contact). The second switch is a Z-wave relay switch (non-dimmer) that controls the low-sone fan. This whole arrangement is managed by the Elk with a temp sensor in the ceiling of the closet to kick the fan on and off. The fan vents under the eave of the house through a grill.

2) For security purposes, I also have two fail-open magnetic deadbolts that engage the door if the Elk is in alarm mode. This keeps the burglar out of the room for a short time while the Elk is busy notifying me, my neighbor and the police. These bolts only engage in alarm mode so they draw no current otherwise.

3) Interior doors are pretty flimsy and noise passes right through them. I took the door off and drilled about 5 air-exit holes through each side (!) and then injected Great Stuff expanding foam inside the holes until it came out of the other holes. The stuff dries as hard as rock and turned a flimsy door into a sound-deadening rock-hard block of foam that any burglar would break bones trying to get through. After the expanding foam dried, I re-drilled the holes through the foam (just enough to get through the edge), filled the holes with wood putty and re-painted the door. From all outside appearances it is just a normal entry door but you can feel the "heft" when you open it.

4) Almost forgot to mention; the closet doors in my house run all the way to the floor since that area is not meant to be cooled or heated with the A/C. I cut off about 1 inch from the bottom of the door to let the cool air in when the fan is running. The edges of the door have strip insulation to keep the heat out of the house during the summer.

5) I'm toying with the idea of using a Y-duct to vent the closet to my A/C air duct in the winter so I can use the heat generated in the room to add a minimal amount of house heating. It probably wouldn't be much, but why waste the heat?

Just thought I'd throw some additional ideas out there :blink:
 
I have two stories.... i havent' installed yet, but i have no choice but to vent out to the living room (various reasons as seen in my "showcase")... exhaust would probably be around 8-9' above the floor the top of the (10' ceiling)
 
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