Well, our little business that started with just my Dad and I and one other guy has grown to the point where we are getting a new building. Among the many hats I wear in the small company is that I'm in charge of setting up the new server room. Having only worked briefly for companies that were large enough to have a real server room, I thought I'd elicit suggestions from some of the braintrust here.

Some more info on what we have. We have a single 19inch rack which currently houses our servers, switch, firewall/router and phone system. Our battery backups are currently APC UPS's that are wall mounted behind the rack. Our CSU/DSU is also wall mounted, but that was because the ISP did not bring a rack-mountable unit.

One thing I'm already doing is having a separate climate-control unit for that room, as that is something we currently wrestle with. Because we don't have a load of money to throw at it, right now I'm just planning on a window-mount unit (secured so that it can't be pushed back through.) Is this a bad idea?

What's the best way to mount the rack itself? Bolts into the concrete slab? How about securing the top? Right now it's just bolted to the wall, but I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Are there any special grounding issues that need to be addressed?

The information I'm really looking for is what a small company who hosts a few sites as well as all of the company internet/telephone on a T-1 needs and what is overkill (ie...raised floor). Things like humidity control, high temperature alarm/notification, remote reboot, power generator (we're a couple hours inland, but still could be affected by hurricanes, mostly by power outages. Flooding should not be a problem), and even wire management are things I'd be very interested in hearing about. We're going to be moving by October 21st, so I have to get hopping on this stuff and get our T1 moved over. Thanks!

EDIT: Also, links to inexpensive but reputable sellers of cable, wall plates, keystone jacks, punch tools, etc.. would be helpful.

I've worked at my current job (a .com) since February 2000 and we had a small telephone room on the corner of the building also used as a server room. This room had a window and management decided to placed a window unit in. It was about October when the unit would freeze up because of humidity. We got a dehumidifier and this solved the freezing up of the window unit but we had a new problem around December. The window unit wouldn't turn the compressor on due to some internal thermostat that makes it think that it doesn't need to cool. We then decided to buy a window unit with the digital display on the front. This worked but any type of small brown out or power blip would cause the unit to turn off. Since this had a digital on/off the unit would not come back on. Then we got a Falcon to monitor the temperature in the room and if it gets above 85 it would text message our cell phones. (The can be done via email.) About a year ago we moved to a new office and in the server room is a Liebert AC with the optional dehumidifier.

We also use an external service http://www.alertra.com/ to check our web servers to see if they are responding to http requests. We also use this service to check and see if the power goes out by pinging a box that doesn't turn back on when the power fails. We can have power go out for less than a second for no damn reason. If any of these fail it will also send a text message to our cell phones.

If you would like to know more we could talk over the phone. PM if you would like my phone number.

Attack:

How cold are the winters where you are? Here in SC, they rarely get below 20 degrees. I only ask because those Liebert units look like they might be beyond our means at the moment. I may try to find a digital window unit that will come back on when power is restored.

The RLE Falcon looks like it might be a good buy. Any idea on what the pricing is?

My only suggestion for cooling is to have about 2x as much A/C capacity as you think you need.. the compressors in home A/C units are not designed to run 24/7 cooling servers.. they tend to wear out a lot more quickly if they arn't allowed to cycle hourly.. a pair of units is probably the best solution. You might look into split units, where the compressor sits outside, and the heat exchanger is a wall-mount unit. spot coolers are also a good solution.

While I can't comment on your rack questions, we had a window mount AC unit exhaling into a warehouse area mated with a small pump to move the waste water to a drain (VERY important this, unless you want mold on your walls). When we added our latest server (sixth one) we overran the capacity of the wall mount unit and had to go to what's called a 'split' unit. The heat exchanger and fans are in a panel in the server room wall, while the compressor and motor are remote mounted. This was about $3500 installed. It works very well for our six servers (three big Dell dual processor/RAID5 towers and three re-purposed workstation towers). The server room now stays at nice chilly 65 degrees.

We might have been able to use a larger window unit, but doing so would have required re-building the wall substantially. I'd consult with a local heating/cooling contractor.

-Zeke

If the building has proper electrical with grounding, and there is heavy enough cable running to the server room (as in, it can handle enough amperage), I don't *think* you have to worry about grounding the rack itself. I don't think ours was.

Now, this is for a simple data center for a small group. If you are doing AV production, and the rack holds audio or video equipment, then grounding is something you have to be very careful about. I heard about how Skywalker sound overhauled their whole building to put in special grounding...

Cool. We'll probably run two circuits to the server room, one for the air conditioner and another 30 Amp circuit for the equipment. That should suffice for the forseeable future.

I was just looking around the net and found this cute little air conditioner. Maybe one of those would be better than a window unit.

Ebay auction for above unit. Shipping is high though.

Oo. And you'd hope, being APC, that they'd design it to recover in the event of a power failure.

Well, one would HOPE anyway. Heh.

On this page, Automatic Restart is checked as one of the features.

EDIT: Although after further research, it looks like their more expensive unit is the one that actually features automatic restart, not this one. The more expensive unit is network controllable and comes with alarms, etc..