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At one of my early jobs I was sysadmin for a local office of a small company that wrote simulation software. We had procured some rack-mounted servers that soun
by prewett 7y ago
At one of my early jobs I was sysadmin for a local office of a small company that wrote simulation software. We had procured some rack-mounted servers that sounded like jet engines, so when we expanded to the office across the street, the boss took the opportunity to knock out two closets and make a server room. I remember having a conversation with him where he asked my advice on the size of A/C to buy. Despite having no knowledge on the subject, I had opinions, and I recommended getting the biggest A/C.
That all got installed, and it was great, we no longer had a jet engine in the room next door, and I felt awesome because not only was I managing 10 Linux machines but now I had a compute cluster. In a rack. With a little slide-out KVM thing that switched between the machines!
Well, several months later I started noticing mold on the side of the closet, and a thin condensation on the rack sometimes. So I got a temperature monitor and wrote a script to create pretty graphs, and between the low temperature and the central Texas humidity, we had a problem.
So the boss (who was in the New York office) had me talk to someone who actually knew something about A/C (because I had no idea why this was happening). Apparently I had spec'ed out an A/C large enough to cool the entire building, and that the problem I was experience was why one matches the A/C to the heat load. The solution was to add a heater to the A/C. So we ended up cooling a building's worth of air, then heating it up, and then sending it to cool 2U's of servers.
- quacked 7y agoThis sounds like a sophomore engineering student's weeklong nightmare of a thermodynamics assignment. "Part f) Your boss realizes you don't have any money left in the budget to replace the A/C unit, but he knows a supplier who can deliver individual heaters for cheap. How many 1500W heaters will be needed to maintain a server room temperature of..."
- mtnGoat 7y agoyou could just throw some crypto miners up, if you want to burn electricity and warm the place... might make a few pennies too.
- m463 7y agoThat reminds me of a time I was working at a site delivering a big project. They had put up a big temporary building next to the project building to hold a lot of additional engineers. The temporary building seemed to be the commerical equivalent of 10 double-wide mobile homes side by side with the side walls removed. There's probably a name for it. The end result was a ramp from the main building, leading up and turning into a long room maybe 200' long and 40' wide filled with lots of desks with engineers. There were also columns every so often for network and power drops. There was also a thermostat every 20 feet or so. (see where this is going?) I happened to be working late one night and entered this room after everyone was gone. And the funny thing was, even though it was cool outside, all the AC units seemed to be running and making a lot of noise. Walking down the middle of the room and looking at the thermostats I realized what had happened. Everybody had their own "comfortable" and they were all set to different temperatures. The result was at night you had heating and ac running, sometimes right next to each other, in an epic battle. I went to each thermostat and set it to the same value, and within a short time equilibrium was reached and the entire room quieted down as the compressors and fans wound down. Thinking back, I wonder how long my fix lasted.