dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson) (04/18/88)
I'd like to know how other sites are handling the problem of Personal
Unix boxes, especially with disks, in hot offices. Unix systems want
to be left on most of the time, either to allow access from home or
the net or just to avoid the problems of a shut-down. This means that they
throw off heat, even on weekends. It's not unusual for such
a system to throw off several hundred watts. Some machines
will throw off more than a kilowatt. And most personal machines will
be located in offices whose doors are closed on weekends.
Because these machines are really high-tech space heaters, they can
run into problems with facilities managers who are trying to save on their
energy budget. In one of our buildings, the air conditioning goes off at
6 PM on Friday and doesn't come back on until 8AM on Monday. In a closed
office with a kilowatt or so of space-heating, it can easily get to be well
over a hundred degrees on a hot July weekend afternoon. This can be very
harmful to disks, etc.
In the past, with multi-user systems, we have gotten special air-conditioning
installed in the rooms where these systems were installed. (Even this didn't
happen until we had lost several thousand dollars of disk-drive.) However,
it probably isn't feasable to get each office containing a Xenix system or
a Sun-with-shoebox specially air-conditioned.
Our facilities man puts the cost of weekend air-conditioning at over $200k
per year, so this is no trivial issue.
How do you address this problem?
--
Craig Jackson
UUCP: {harvard!axiom,linus!axiom,ll-xn}!drilex!dricej
BIX: cjacksondwm@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Meeks) (04/19/88)
In article <545@drilex.UUCP>, dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson) writes: > Our facilities man puts the cost of weekend air-conditioning at over $200k > per year, so this is no trivial issue. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- That would mean weekday air conditioning is running at better than $500k per year. How about using several smaller AC units and leaving only those systems on that cool offices with workstations? Addtionally, stuffing servers into specific areas with AC of there own. Most diskless machines require little air-conditioning and could just as easily be turned off until Monday. Yes, that may mean more than one set of chilled water pipes, etc... Workstations have problems of thier own which include: power, air, admin, /dev/null cycles and space. Everybody wants one, I have one, yet I still think programming would be better off running on windowing terminals ( like: AT&T 630's ) and major cpu machines. At any rate, these are my notes on AC and workstations and not necessarily those of my companies or anyone elses. --dwm ( Daniel W. Meeks @ [ihnp4!]ihlpf!iecp1!dwm )