Rack Heat Issue

[Eric Firkey]

We have had a couple power supplies and disk drives fail in the last month or two and we feel that it may be heat related.

We have a compaq rack with two RP3440 Servers, one MSA with 14 drives, three DL380G5 Servers, and a MSL2024.

The room is air conditioned and the rack has a fan in the top to help circulate the air.

All the systems are powered with 110V power. Would switching to 220V power make the equipment run cooler and thus less prone to failure?

Any comments or suggesions are appreciated

[Saberus]

What is the model number of the Compaq rack?

I am not familiar with the airflow requirements of the other equipment, but the DL380G5 servers require the front of the cabinet to have at least 64% open, i.e. a good deal of holes to let air in.

I use an old 22U Compaq 7000 series rack for a personal testing lab, and to make sure the servers get enough air, I have to have the front door removed.

Also, if there are gaps between the servers, the airflow will not be correct, exhaust air could recycle to the front and be taken into the server instead of the cool air. You might want to also check that the fan on top is not forcing the exhaust into the path of the cool air.

Moving to higher voltage may help as well, from what I've seen, the power supplies are much more efficient with the higher voltages and do produce less waste heat, but they are the only part that will run cooler on high voltage. (Though not by much, they already run about 89% efficient at 110, at 220 they're about 93-97%, but this varies between models)

As far as the drives, make sure you have all slots filled with either a drive or a blank, if there are gaps, the air will not flow correctly over the drives nearby, and they will not keep cool.