Rack mount cooling We have a wall mounted comms cabinet, it's about 12u It gets hot...about 35 degrees. I could do with a decent 19" cooling solution such as this: http://www.limitedgoods.com/itemVie...urce=FroogleUK&medium=free&campaign=FroogleUK But not sure what to make of that, £95 is very cheap. Any suggestions for a decent product? ta
I've done a number of installations and never had to use any rack cooling solutions. Is the comms unit in it's own rack or is it accompanied by other kit? Is it fan cooled or convection cooled? Does the rack have adequate ventilation or is the back sealed/close to a wall? Is the rack in a small room with limited air supply? Whilst a rack fan might initially lower the temperature of the unit, it can also just start circulating hot air if the space/airflow of the rack is limited. I would guess that your heat problems could be addressed in a cheaper and possibly more effective way. BTW 35 degrees really isn't a dangerous temperature for electronics so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
35C sounds about right. Just checking one of our setups in a comms room, I've found that the standard temp in one of ours is around 29C, but thats a comms room with aircon in it. I'd be worried if it's hitting 40C odd, as that would seriously impede on your cooling. for a 12U rack you're probably alright. If you're gonna get something like that I'd set it up to extract the hot air from the top of the unit (as hot air rises upwards). Bear in mind it's likely to make the room where it's situated a tad warmer
Cheers for the reply Chickenfizz - I think we've got slightly crossed wires. By comms rack I actually mean the rack, which has inside 2 switches, a Digital ISDN30 gateway, and some routers which have just been chucked in at the bottom (they're just small, not rack mountable). I was able to remove 2 devices but it's not making alot of difference The rack is wall mounted and it's just a few inches below the ceiling, there are a few vents though. Room is fairly small and there's no air con. The temperature is being read by a thermomoter blu-tacked onto the glass front panel so it could be a few degrees extra. I'm concerend because in my last job I had a router fall over in similar circumstances, and the ambient temps in the room will start to increase as we edge towards summer.. Conway, good point about the airflow. I'd rather take some kind of action because it's my responsibility if something fails...and prevention is certainly better than a cure
if you're really concerned about it, then you can monitor the temperature of the gear inside the cabinet if it permits. Most devices now allow SNMP stats to be fed back to a central server for analysis, including most old cisco gear. Even home routers can do it now. This can include temperature information, so you can get it to generate email alerts to your inbox if some of your gear suddenly starts overheating. We use it to monitor the government department we look after Have a read of the manuals for the devices and see if they allow it.
Funny you should say that. It's all 3Com Enterprise class kit, and they do a proper snmp suite to manage all the stuff, so I will check it out. I've had a bit tidy of the stuff that was just chucked at the bottom, cos it was covering the vents. The boss just said to get one of the rack fans anyway, may not make a massive difference but for the money it's not the end of the world if it doesn't work. I've also freed up some space so may put a 1u gap between the kit Well, i'll report back with findings/results
