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| Muddybigdog Member Since: 11 Apr 2014 Location: Suffolk Posts: 1023   
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Not sure what sort of Data/Stats you are looking for, but is this any good for you?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/acoustic-sh...cgettrick/ Jumped ship to reliability - Mitsubishi L200 Puma 90 XS - Sold D3 - 2.7 S x2 (both Sold) Freelander 2 HSE - Sold Freelander 1 - Sold Disco 2 - Sold |
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6th Jul 2023 4:22pm |
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| Rashers Member Since: 21 Jun 2015 Location: Norfolk Posts: 3521 
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Are we talking a small room to put a server in or a big room with multiple racks?
You need to think about cooling the area as servers create heat - lots of heat. Server Room design is a bit of a niche area. In large rooms, air conditioning units push air under a raised floor. Vents in the floor then push the cold air up in a 'cold' zone. In the hot zones, where the heat is expelled, the air is extracted (usually opposite sides of the server rack). The raised floor also aids getting cables in and out of the servers. Depending on how critical your server / data is, and the type of building this is going into, fire suppression is usually installed. If you have a raised floor, it is usually a good insurance to put smoke heads under the floor, even if the void distance wouldn't usually require protection. Make sure your cable access and egress into and out of the room are sealed to create a fire barrier. Noise could be a problem, but without a scope, it's hard to say what you would require. Your electrical supply will need to be sufficient to take the whole load 100% of the time (no diversity) and again, depending on criticality of the data, an Uninterruptible Power Supply (a big battery pack with an inverter) and generator will more than likely be required. The UPS will need to be large enough to take the whole load of the servers until the generator can be spooled up and the load safely transferred. The generators will also need to run your AC and ventilation as the servers will overheat without. If all you have is a data cabinet (often called a server) a cupboard will do and it probably won't even need air conditioning. Hope that helps. I am no expert in Server Room design. It really is a specialist kind of a thing. All of the above is what I have noted working in many server rooms over the years. |
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6th Jul 2023 8:08pm |
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| pjm-84 Member Since: 12 Apr 2021 Location: Hampshire Posts: 662
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Waited for someone else to answer and as above.
Typically called Comms room if they have a data cabinet. I typically make then 30min as they are a cupboard and I cant control what subsequently goes into them. Cooling is an unknown and usually an end user it fit out consideration. Only once did I have gas suppression (Joint Control Centre (Fire / Police / Ambulance)) 30min severe construction will typically provide sufficient acoustic separation when considering external user background noise. I.e if it was a quiet area I might consider upping it. Very nuance. Data storage (lots of heat / power) - completely different matter. Last edited by pjm-84 on 7th Jul 2023 8:12am. Edited 1 time in total |
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6th Jul 2023 9:15pm |
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| kenzle8a Member Since: 12 Feb 2020 Location: None Posts: 1074 
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This is also why nobody builds server rooms any more. We have all our stuff on remote at managed data centres, every large project ive worked on has been on the cloud as they say since 2017 when even our last web provider shuttered their on site back ups due to the hassle of running them. |
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7th Jul 2023 6:23am |
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| Rashers Member Since: 21 Jun 2015 Location: Norfolk Posts: 3521
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Wholly agree with pjm-84 and lord-haggis
A few years back I worked on a data centre within an office for a large Government run organisation. They were loading blade servers into this room like they were going out of fashion. The heat build up within was overloading the air con which had been sized for a much smaller number of servers. Summertime it was a constant battle trying to cool the room especially as the condensers and the external walls were south facing. You soon realise that IT people and building services people don’t communicate well  The overtime was immense
I did get to work on some really large data centres. The buildings are usually split into areas (which customers would hire) and each unit had its own electrical supply, had its own generator, UPS and air conditioning. To be sure, these were all doubled so in essence they had a spare generator, UPS and air conditioning if the other one fell over or needed maintenance. Enormous amounts of electricity supplied to the building and heat being extracted. If anyone ever thinks the internet of things is good for the environment, they have never seen a data centre. And there are dozens of these things all round the country. They are an enormous security risk so they are never advertised. I did ask why the heat wasn’t recovered. At the time this would have required cooling towers and the management of these to prevent legionella was always more trouble than it was worth. I think they do recover heat from some of these places these days which can’t be a bad thing. |
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7th Jul 2023 7:33am |
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| excossack Member Since: 22 Feb 2012 Location: North West Posts: 5855 
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Cheers all.
A bit of background. The original server room had underfloor vents/cooling. This was removed and replaced by ceiling/wall mounted aircon units. We did have sort of warm/cold aisle setup. The server room, around 20-25 racks each 42u rack pretty much full with either servers and comms or a bit of both. 20-25 racks slimmed down to around 15 when we moved from physical to virtual servers running on C7000 and then Netapp HCI/FAS. We then got asked to relocate from the server room of 40 years (15 of these before my time there) A new room converted from office space to a server room and we trimmed down to 8 racks. (lots of old kit no longer needed and also comms kit got slimmed down and C7000 went) The new room (roughly 6mx6m) had fire suppression installed and aircon. Along with 10kva x 2 ups's and new power feeds. No under floor cooling and no sealed warm/cold aisle but we did want this and didnt happen. A new ceiling installed and sealed to create a smaller space (original roof height was around 6m high as this was originally an old train engine shed then converted to offices over quite a few years.) All servers transported, racked and now live in a DR setup. A new building is being built for us and originally back 2 or 3 years ago no provision for a server room (only comms rooms on each floor) was on the plans as the powers that be thought the cloud was a good solution... As soon as we finished building the new server room and decoming the old one, we got asked what would it take to relocate (again) in around April next year It appears now that a server server room (6x6.6m) is on the cards. That brings the story to were we are now and the question around acoustics and fire ratings. 1999 Defender TD5 110 Regards John M0VAZ Econet Station 48 no clock |
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7th Jul 2023 9:34am |
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| Caterham Member Since: 06 Nov 2008 Location: Birmingham Posts: 6304  
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I believe many of the new large data centres rely fair less on cooling than they did historically.
I understand much of the electronic equipment will operate in ambient temperatures of up to circa 30-35C. As such for the majority of the year cooling (free cooling) can be achieved by a significantly increased level of ventilation / air changes. |
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7th Jul 2023 9:30pm |
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| Procta Member Since: 03 Dec 2016 Location: Sunderland Posts: 5201
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if i am right, a lot of stuff as gone VMware too? Defender TD5 90 ---/--- Peugeot 306 HDI hatch back
Success is 90% Inspiration and 4 minutes Preparation # you can make it! |
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7th Jul 2023 11:52pm |
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| excossack Member Since: 22 Feb 2012 Location: North West Posts: 5855
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We have lots of VM servers running on VMWare. 1999 Defender TD5 110
Regards John M0VAZ Econet Station 48 no clock |
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10th Jul 2023 6:28am |
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| mikeh501 Member Since: 07 Jan 2013 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 1142
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Jeez, how come you haven’t pushed these workloads either onto public cloud or even just a colo centre? The days of physical kit are numbered unless you’ve a special use case imho. I look after a medium size setup for a pic of 1500 servers across five data centres and were about 70% through moving to the cloud. |
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11th Jul 2023 4:25pm |
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| excossack Member Since: 22 Feb 2012 Location: North West Posts: 5855
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We have one server room shared with another business. We have 8 racks there as well.
We have looked into using someone else's server room in the I-o-M. For some workloads, if did put the servers into the cloud (vendors cloud) we would lose some features that the social care department rely on (real time data for bed discharges is one feature, plus database access for various tasks) We have had costs for clouding and some think its overly expensive compared to being on site, also some systems run on Solaris/Oracle which AFAIK won't run in say Azure. 1999 Defender TD5 110 Regards John M0VAZ Econet Station 48 no clock |
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12th Jul 2023 7:14am |
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| Procta Member Since: 03 Dec 2016 Location: Sunderland Posts: 5201
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you lads ever used this in a working environment? I have had a bit of a play with it, with windows 3.11 and windows 95 clients
 Click image to enlarge also do you lads still use good old NT4 still? Click image to enlarge I studied windows 2003 server, but could i hell get in the field to pass the exam. Defender TD5 90 ---/--- Peugeot 306 HDI hatch back Success is 90% Inspiration and 4 minutes Preparation # you can make it! |
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13th Jul 2023 7:52pm |
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| excossack Member Since: 22 Feb 2012 Location: North West Posts: 5855
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I did use Windows NT back around early 2000. NT is well gone now in our network. As is 2003. 1999 Defender TD5 110
Regards John M0VAZ Econet Station 48 no clock |
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13th Jul 2023 8:04pm |
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| Procta Member Since: 03 Dec 2016 Location: Sunderland Posts: 5201
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what is the earliest OS that is still in service? We still ran windows NT4 with XP clients right up till 2020, until they switched over to windows 7. This is for the booking in system for the production lines, everything else is on windows 10.
ever used Novell Netware? Defender TD5 90 ---/--- Peugeot 306 HDI hatch back Success is 90% Inspiration and 4 minutes Preparation # you can make it! |
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13th Jul 2023 11:09pm |
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