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S. room Temp. suggestion

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by johnnywatt 1 view

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Fellow IT'ers, can I get a recommendation on a server room tempature for small room, 3 servers and phone system?

17 replies

by craig herberg

If you can keep the room in the low 70s F., that would be good. Do you have a separate thermostat in the room? Don't forget ventilation.

by cactus pete

The model can probably be found on the website of the manufacturer. If you have any trouble, post the models and I'll help you out (probably someone will even beat me to it...)

by johnnywatt

1 DELL PowerEdge server, 2 Compaq Servers and 3 other workstation PCs in the room. Also a PBX, dMarc , Adtran and Cisco 1700 router. Relatively small room. I am starting a new job and would like to offer a recommendation on room tempature. When I popped in during my interview it was room tempature and I thought to myself, this can't be good.

by johnnywatt

Thank you for your help. I don't have the model number at this time. Do you agree with the post of 68 F for server room tempature?

by newu

If you keep it in the 68-70 range you shouldn't have any problem.

I have seen a server room that had servers running in 79-91 degree heat. Despite repeated suggestions to get the room better AC they decided not to do anything about it. The interesting part is that the servers in the room haven't had any problems......yet.

by cactus pete

Remember to put enough cooling there to accomodate future growth. What is just as important is a constant humidity level. You don't want it too dry or too wet in there... We keep ours around the low 30s.

by angry_white_male

We keep our server room around 68 degrees with the humidity at around 35%

If you see regularly condensation in your server room - you're gonna have problems.

Work with the person who takes care of the HVAC for your facility - make sure everything's at the right level. Ideally the server room should have it's own dedicated HVAC system and a good air filtration system - otherwise, by keeping the server room cool - you may be deep freezing the people working in that part of the building.

Also consider that if you have a halon or other type of fire extinguishing system that smothers the flames, that if the server room has a common cold-air return to that of the rest of the building, you may cause problems for the rest of the building's occupants. So really you need to have the room phyiscally isolated from the rest of the building environment.

by johnnywatt

There is a separate HVAC and thermostat in the room. I believe when I stepped in there, the tempature was 76F.

by jmgarvin

You might want to keep a couple of portable A/Cs in the room as well...just in case.

68F is usually pretty good and you probably don't want to go above 72F-74F. You should have an alarm that signals if you get above or below threshold.

Also, make sure the air actually circulates, if it doesn't you might still have heat problems.

by craig herberg

If you use portables, make sure they vent outside the room. As far as I know, they haven't improved them to 110% efficiency yet.

by cactus pete

Make sure the cool air is goign to the intake of the equipments' fans. Don't cool the exhaust, or you won't really do much. If possible, have the hvac pull ait from behind the devices and blow air into the front.

If you have a UPS in there, you can probably add an environmental monitor to the device and have it alert you when temp and hum. fall outside your preferred paramters.

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