Cooling Server Room

4 Tricks For Cooling a Server Room

Your CEO might not believe this, but cooling a server room is important. Your servers and hardware aren’t impervious to heat and if you can’t control the temperature in the room you keep that hardware in, you might be in for some heat-related trouble.

If your server room is hotter than a summer day on planet Mercury, then try these four easy tricks to cool a server room!

1st Trick For Cooling A Server Room: Install a Portable Air Conditioner

Installing a portable air conditioner into your server room can be a good way to keep it cool. But if you can’t afford it or don’t see the value in dropping a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can always make your own air conditioner:

Here are a few tips regarding this DIY air conditioner: When filling the air conditioner with ice and water, the room might get humid. Keep an eye on the humidity levels. If you don’t monitor and control the humidity, you could create static electricity problems or cause condensation on the equipment. To limit humidity, use really cold bottles of water instead of tons of ice water.

This means a bit more manual work, but it should do the trick.

This DIY air conditioner is cheap and easy to make. It will help you cool down your server room or data center quickly. There are other versions out there as well, so look for other videos on YouTube if you don’t like that one.

2nd Trick For Cooling A Server Room: Ceiling Hacks

If I remember high school science correctly, heat rises. Try removing a few ceiling tiles, which will lift the heat beyond the top of your server racks.

If you don’t have ceiling tiles or you determine this is a fire code violation where you work, add a vent above your doorway for the hot air to escape. Just make sure that if and when you achieve an optimal cold temperature in the server room, close the vent to keep the cool air in.

3rd Trick for Cooling A Server Room: Use Blanking Panels

Blanking panels are installed where you don’t have servers on your rack. Without blanking panels, cooler air will travel into the space where the server isn’t rather than to the top of your server rack.

The top of your server rack will experience problems first (remember, heat rises), so by placing the blanking panels in the rack, the cool air will travel up to the top of the rack, rather than into the rack and behind it—which is where all the hot air resides.

4th Trick for Server Room Cooling: Move Servers to the Cloud

Fewer servers means less power consumption and therefore less heat. A cloud file server can go a long way to aiding with your server room cooling. Worried about the lack of a file server in your office? Many startups go with a LAN-less environment and use an all-in-one file management solution like SmartFile for global access to files in the cloud.

These four tips will help server room cooling, though they aren’t the most ideal solutions. Consider getting your server room or data center its own separate air conditioning or cooling system.

Also, on top of these four tricks, considering installing heat and humidity monitors in the server room. This will help you identify if you have an issue developing.

If you’re having problems funding your project to keep your server room cool, remind your CEO how much business you lost the last time your hardware went down.

 

Server Room Cooling With SmartFile Cloud

 

SmartFile is a business file mangement platform that gives you more control, compliance and security.

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