Keeping your Server Cool

One of the most important aspects to maintaining your server’s overall functionality is its cooling system. Overheating is one of the most common reasons servers fail. Servers are big machines full of constantly running components in close contact with one another; it’s no surprise how easy it is for servers to overheat. Overheating can drastically affect your server’s performance, making it fail and/or crash completely, which could result in wasted time and important data loss. There are a few different ways to cool your server system.

Liquid Submersion Cooling

One method of cooling your server is to submerge the system’s components in a thermally conductive fluid. The liquid is not electrically conductive and it provides excellent convection cooling. This method also protects the server’s components from humidity and water without the need for a heat-sink or any fans. While this method has been used in servers before, it is more typically used for cooling large distribution components like transformers.

Heat Pipe

The heat pipe method of cooling uses a pipe to transfer heat out of the server’s case. It does this using a hollow tube which contains some kind of heat transfer liquid. The liquid inside the tube absorbs heat and evaporates at the end of the pipe. The vapor created when the liquid evaporates then travels to the cooler end of the tube where it condenses and gives up its latent heat. That condensed liquid then returns to the hot end of the tube by either gravity or capillary action and repeats the cycle. While this method is efficient, it is incredibly expensive, and therefore rarely used in large computer systems. It is more commonly used when space is limited, like in small form-factor computers and laptops, or when fan noise cannot be tolerated, like in audio production, for example.

Fans

The most commonly used method of cooling is the use of fans. Server fans are generally located in the middle of the server’s enclosure, between the server’s hard drives at the front and the passive CPU heat-sinks at the rear of the enclosure. An excellent example of an efficient server fan is the HP 496066-001 Hot Plug Fan. This fan is compatible with HP ProLiant DL380 G6, DL385 G5 and G7 servers. It is light-weight and, as it is a hot-plug component, can easily be connected inside your server. Hot-plug is a term that is used to describe the addition of components that can expand the system without significant interruption to the operation of your server system.  Basically, if a device is hot-pluggable that means it can be quickly and easily added into your server while the server is still running. Hot-pluggable components are very important in server configurations as powering down and restarting a server is a fairly slow process and will result in a great deal of time-loss for both your employees and your clients.

Temperature-Controlled Data Center

Along with a decent internal cooling system, it is important to keep the data center in which your server lives at a constant temperature as well. It is a good idea to make sure your data center is equipped with a good air conditioning system, a filtered ventilation system and an environmental monitoring system that will monitor heat, humidity, and so on.

However you decide to keep your server cool is entirely up to you, but it is definitely something you need to consider when setting your business up with servers.