Rob Cherry wrote: > I am working on a brand new IT room for around 4 high (12kw?) power > racks and 2 wiring racks. I was talking to the obvious choice - > Liebert - and they came back with a fairly eye watering quote that > made me question whether they are the only game in town. During my > research I fell across two companies - Rittal for cooling and Rittal's > rebadge of Eaton technologies Powerware line of UPSes. > > Rittal seem to have an extremely interesting product called the "LCP" > which is a liquid cooled 11" wide blower unit that sits in between 2 > racks and blows cold air across the faces of both adjoining racks. It > then sucks the hot air from the back of the servers. It is able to > operate in a variety of closed or open loop configurations - you can > leave the faces of the racks open/meshed and blow cold air into the > room, whilst leaving the backs of the racks closed/glass door to suck > hot air in. If you need to go blade server crazy (30kW+ racks) you > can go closed face front and back, and have a rittal unit on both > sides of the rack. For those that are interested I found this PDF - > http://www.equipmentprotectionmagazine.com/images/rittal-2.pdf. > Reading between the lines it looks like around $11.5k for each unit, > but I havent managed to get any real pricing out of them yet. > > On the power side, the Eaton Powerware 9390 > (http://powerquality.eaton.com/Products-services/Backup-Power-UPS/9390.aspx) > looks like a reasonable competitor to the Liebert NX UPS. Beyond that > I have zero opinion on it. It seems like a good tool to beat Liebert > over the head on pricing, but the reseller claims it is more > efficient/moderner/betterer so maybe it is worth taking seriously. > Curious to know if anyone has nice things to say about them. > > Anyway, wanted to throw the info out there in case people are > interested. Would be interested to hear if anyone has strong opinions > on either product, or warnings against them :-) > > Regards, > > Many people have already commented on the UPS side, so I'll cover a bit of cooling.
consider a hot air plenum solution. Liebert and Chatsworth are both in this space. Liebert uses an active door to forceably blow the hot air up a smaller duct into a plenum (false ceiling) that feeds directly to your air handlers. Chatsworth uses a passive chimney and relies on a variable speed air handler to do the work. Of the two solutions, the Chatsworth is less money in operations and slightly more expensive in capital for the rack. But you get pay back very quickly. Chatsworth can help you design the system (air handler CFM recommendations) based upon your need. 12KW will be no problem. We have a similar system almost ready for use at our DR area. For your air handler, I recommend the Lieberts. They are very solid. I'd go with two with variable speed blowers for this instance. You set them so that your room temperature is ambient (very comfortable) and then the machines blow hot air up into the plenum (a combination of convection and air handler pull). It's very energy efficient. The trick is you have to make sure you have enough height in your room for this design. A good datacenter architect can help with that, but there is no need for a raised floor. Other solutions like the cooling units that somebody else mentioned are also good, but they require bringing chilled water out to your floor somehow, which usually means you have to put in a raised floor to get the chilled water pipe out to the units. Liebert also makes several of these where you put the units between adjacent racks for N+1 redundancy, but you only need a very small overall air conditioner to keep the room at ambient. It's probably a more expensive solution to go this way because of the added expense of a raised floor and additional piping. It will be efficient, but probably not more so than the Chatsworth solution, and more capital. For PDUs I like servertech. They have optional temperature and humidity probes and a plethora of models and all of the nice SNMP whizzy-bangy stuff that APC has. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
