How To Build A Great Server Closet (for small/medium businesses)

server closets I'm a really long ones guy but hopefully you're watching this video because you're interested in server closet so you want to know the do's and don'ts the best practices of server closets or if you're a boss and your IT guy sent you this video to watch in which case I'm going to explain why you need a server closet why it's so important some of the stuff to get right and wrong now know what you're thinking but our company is tiny we don't really need a server closet this space is going to be set up to support about 50 people give or take but the advice is applicable from 10 people all the way up to probably 75 or 100 people if you've got more than 100 things would probably be a little different this is also a space ultimately the server closet here is gonna be 10 by 20 so there's enough room here for 3 maybe 4 standard 19-inch racks you're gonna have more than that or multiple rows or a lot more space some things will change but the general advice will be pretty good no matter what sort of data closet you might be building for your company let's get started [Music] now level one text we want to walk you through doing a project the right way and a server clause that is so important for business I don't care what your day job is what you what your job is what you do all day long whether you're a plumber or you know a day trader working in you know a mega Corp your computational infrastructure is probably one of the most important aspects of your business and unless you're completely in the cloud and even if you are completely in the cloud you probably going to need some local infrastructure having a centralized place for your technology is so important the very first thing to think about in our checklist is physically where is this located so this is our space this is a 10 by 20 space as I've mentioned before we've got security doors in the front or at least we will by the time this is done but we've got a large opening large double door opening in the front for managing you know in and out that kind of thing this is a space is set up to handle approximately three racks and we're gonna have probably 20 30 thousand BTU of cooling capacity so really we're not talking about a lot of equipment here it is going to support about 50 people give or take at a couple of different locations you know the location here in a remote location so we're gonna have its own separate power panel probably a power generator in the basement this lovely space is a very old building and has a tin ceiling that's why you can hear a little bit of an echo and we're not gonna take the ceiling all the way up that's going to give us a place to run wires electrical whatever we need to the space below us is also accessible somewhat we've also got another floor above us and offices to the right of us offices to the left of us so that the building basically extends like 60 feet in this direction another forty feet in this direction and another forty feet in this direction so we're basically in the very center of the building the reason we do that is to try to stay under the 300 foot length limitation of running wires but even with 10 gigabit 10 gigabit on cat 6 is even more important because a hundred feet about one third of your overall you know length limitation for ten gigabit is important because you can do 10 gigabit on a lot of brands on every brand of cat6 if you keep it under a hundred feet it's not a hard and fast rule it's a little a little bit of play a little bit of flexibility in that unless you want to run cat 6a everywhere 10 gig 10 gigs what we're thinking about another thing that you want to think about is plumbing so where we are in the middle of the building there is no plumbing above us there's no plumbing and either one of these walls there's some plumbing below us but it's really not much and if a pipe burst on you know say it Friday at 5:03 p.m. the office is a ghost town and if an office you know if there's a pipe that burst at 5:03 p.m. because everybody's gone and it's gonna flood the entire weekend what does it do to this room well basically nothing now if we did have plumbing that ran overhead you know above the tin ceiling or there was some bucket sink up there or something like that then I would probably insist on putting some type of plastic this you know industrial plastic even like just really really thick heavy plastic on top of the server room so that the server like if there was some ever a water event inside it would just run off of your server because $10 of plastic over here server closet especially I mean this is only 10 by 20 feet so it's feasible if you you know obviously this is different if you're on a data center in the day center this you would have monitoring and all kinds of stuff but if there's a water leak or something like that the water is gonna run away from our server racks so we sort of think about where the server racks are gonna be in here we'll just you know tape down some plastic in the ceiling above so if there is ever actually a problem it'll be handled soundproofing is another concern this wall yeah it's just fine two by fours and they're not really I'm not really two by fours well this is a double wall and so it's gonna be open on the inside here and it's gonna have rock wool insulation rock wall insulation is a great soundproofing option there's gonna be an office somebody's gonna basically be stationed here in the office opposite the server closet we don't want them to go insane from the the were and chatter and click eNOS of three racks of heat producing systems in the room next door so this wall is offset in this way or soundproofing this gives us a ton of room to put Wroclaw installation is gonna be double drywalled this is something you can talk to your contractor about they'll understand this language like we're gonna soundproof this we're gonna use rockwool we're gonna double up on the two by fours those are all pieces of information that your contractor will understand and they'll be able to implement the wall this way it's gonna kill all of the sound from this room everywhere that this wall meets another wall or meets another structure you have this phone this phone works really well for deadening any other sound so we have brick walls on either side of this and this is actually going to be between the new two by fours and the brick wall just to kill even in you know any other sound even further and it's just good construction practice when you're doing it soundproofing installation now the wall on the opposite side from me is already complete that's a drywall that you're looking at so instead of using the rock wall installation approach there we're gonna use drywall clips there's clips that you can install on an existing drywall wall that will allow another layer of drywall to move because this wall is already pretty well insulated and there's more office space on the other side of the wall we think that's probably gonna be good enough for our soundproofing for the floor soundproofing you just installed a rubber membrane just above the plywood floor below the actual finished floor that you're gonna use that's built into a lot of artificial and commercial grade artificial wood and commercial grade floors that exists now so just like our two by fours we'll be able to use foam essentially it's going to be a little bit different maybe rubber into the foam but I will be able to use that to insulate the sound for the floor that's below now what about our flooring well it's good to be able to support a huge amount of weight so we're using 3/4 inch plywood on three inch thick 16 inch long 16 inch wide oak studs these are ancient they're original to the building but the 3/4 inch tongue and groove plywood will support an immense amount of weight because the 16 inch floor joists are on 12 inch centers so those are of course screwed into the floor joists and that gives this room an immense amount of weight support so what's on the checklist for electrical heating and cooling well it's really easy to figure out your heating capacity it's basically the wattage of the equipment that you're going to install I would multiply by two for future growth at least two maybe three you think about it so a single rack will use twenty or twenty five amps of electricity you can probably check your existing uninterruptible power supplies or your existing server admins to know exactly how much power your server rack is going to use but let's say 25 amps of rack two racks maybe three racks 3.14 it's a little bit more than pie but about PI BTUs per watt you're looking at at least 25,000 BTU for two hot racks in the cold rack well what's a hot rack that cold rag well hot rack have servers in it the cold rack has wiring termination switches things like that it might use a little bit of power it's not really a lot of power of course the ideal time to run wiring is before the drywall is up you can install your boxes you can install conduit whether or not to conduit it's a really a personal preference kind of a thing but electrical electrical definitely you want to run all that before the drywall goes up and for a server closet like this it's going to be more than two rats I strongly recommend having a separate electrical sub panel for your server closet two racks in a smaller office than 50 people you know 50 or 60 amp breaker sub panel would be fine and then you have individual breakers off of that for your racks for this particular setup we're probably going to install a 125 amp subpanel that will serve the cooling system as well as the individual rack so the sub panel will have 125 amp shut off and then it'll have its own set of you know 20 and 30 amp breakers they'll also be two-phase meaning that we could supply 220 volts to our racks we could have 220 volt outlets if we need to you'll find that most servers will operate at 220 volts and because of power factor considerations because the utility company will charge you if your power factors are not well balanced or they'll charge you a doubling of your most-used current on whatever leg of the transformer if you've got all of your stuff on one 110-volt leg and you've got nothing on the other lot like you're gonna be paying twice as much as you were the electrician's are cringing at this explanation but you need your electrician to understand power factor and to help you configure everything so that you're getting the the most efficient thing if you run to 20 and on three-phase or something like that and you run to 20 servers which most servers support because of the whole world wide region thing it may actually cut your power bill a little bit when you're doing a setup like this because it's automatically going to be balanced against both phases of power that are coming into your building so something to consider when you're planning power for your server closet so you might be wondering what this looked like before or the worst things that you've run into in terms of like where do you want to put your server closet and it's bad it's been real bad let me show you if your company depends on i.t and there's one of these in your server closet somebody is doing something wrong oh sure you might be thinking well you know we just don't have enough real estate we're in New York City and space is at a premium there's just on enough room for us to keep the plumbing away from the computers well hope you've got good cloud backups or an off-site backup or a disaster recovery plan because those water pipes will fail in situations where absolutely could not move the hot water heater I had a knock-down-drag-out with a fortune 1000 CTO one time and it was bad I mean it was really bad it was it was it was it was really really bad and this was at a satellite office but it was very important because there was a certain type of data it was only generated at that one office and it fed the entire rest of the company so in a lot of ways it was it was more important I made my case for that I ended up going to Walmart and buying a shower curtain and surrounding the hot water heater and you know I that was gosh that was that was like 10 years ago plus it was a long time ago sure enough I got a call from a friend that still works there and he's like you'll never guess what happened it's like what happened it's like the water lines they were the plastic like the P VEX or whatever it is like that multicolored plastic like those water lines in the server closet burst I have it hadn't been for your Walmart shower curtain and ruined over $100,000 worth of equipment so yeah don't put like just trust me just don't do it it might take 10 years it might take 50 years but eventually the plumbing will fail another important thing you should consider for your server closet is physical access this is a key card system aa key card key code NFC field system of the z-axis at rzk access advanced control system this will ultimately control access to the server closet go ahead and plan that now because you may need to install electronic strike locks or you know other control systems in the wall just to be secure and also just go ahead and install an IPTV system while you're at it just so you can physically see what's going on in the server closet while you're at it it may be less of a concern if you're 10 people but 40 50 100 it's a lot more important you'll be glad that you had it so you might be thinking how do we manage the wiring well snake tray this is pretty pretty interesting this is only gonna go up 10-foot but we've got a 14 foot space there's a tin ceiling at the 14 foot level we'll be able to do all of our wiring above the ceiling level of the offices but below the level of everything else let me to introduce snake tray snake tray is great for running the wire throughout the offices it makes it easy to wire and rewire you've probably seen something like this in open-air stores things like Best Buy or they just don't have a ceiling big-box stores like that probably also seen in server closets that there's a horizontal tray the wires just lay on well obviously it's not super convenient to run that horizontal tray every player but snake tray makes it easy to just screw onto existing wall drywall anchors will hold it in it's available in a bunch of different sizes it's easily bendable with hand tools and it makes it super easy to wire and rewire your offices if your business depends on IP and your IT people are precocious chances are you'll be rewiring things all the time anyway you want to make it new holes in the drywall or do you want to give it a snake trade spike it's like oh we need to get Bob 10 gig he's 105 feet away let's run cat6a we just lay it in the snake tray and you're done not extensive rework required you might need some conduit in the walls to just handle that end of it the by and large snake tray makes life easier on everybody and that's the plan here now it's starting to sound like a server closet it's a little bit more well-put-together here we've got the power distribution stuff coming down from the ceiling for powering the racks and you can see the breaker panel on the far wall now the equipment is not fully loaded in here yet but you can see that there's plenty of room to pull the racks you know in and out from the wall as is necessary we got a low voltage rack over here with all the appropriate wiring and some temporary wrought wiring the course cooling system this is a primary there's also a backup it's mobile communications lock it's all sort of still in process and then of course you know the breaker panel this is sort of in the middle of installation but part of the alarm system camera system and electronic lock system and that's how you do a server closet for a small-medium business I guess well there's still quite a few eyes to dot and T's to cross over all something bad [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 95,865

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: RUa8r3432tc

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 19 2018