Water cooled servers

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 00:08

Stacked water servers build log

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rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 00:10

Stacked water servers build log

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Roverno · 7 Feb 2016 at 16:11

How on earth did you get the money from a business to build this lol? In what world is watercooled necessary or safe for server use?!

Love it!

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 16:45

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 16:48

Roverno · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:02

I can't even seem to convince management where i work, doing 3D CAD, that having high clock speed and IPC is way better than loads of cores when workloads are single thread! And that SSDs would really help with system speed and responsiveness. Sigh...

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:11

cadmunkey · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:14

Those look smart! Nice job

Agree with the SSDs, nothing helps system performance get a quick boost than upgrading to them.

Roverno · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:20

Profile management seems to be a massive issue that just gets ignored. Some people sit and wait for 20-30 minutes for their profile to load. As far as i can tell, its a full gigabit network, thats what the connection reports in windows so that interface should not be the problem. Server hardware is pretty dated as well though i think, probably not been updated in the last 4-5 years. In fairness i am an Engineer and my job is not to sort IT issues so its not my place to say what should and shouldn't be done, but with the knowledge i have gained as a hobby, some things do really frustrate me.

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:30

TechMinerUK · 7 Feb 2016 at 17:32

I think this has been a really cool concept, It looks great too

My only concern about this is how does your work feel about the issues such as leaks as there must be some sort of backup system just in case?

Still though, brilliant work

kaku · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:04

How is it going to help in the event of AC failure? The radiators are all inside the cases and rely on the ambient air temperature for cooling.

TechMinerUK · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:07

kaku said:
How is it going to help in the event of AC failure? The radiators are all inside the cases and rely on the ambient air temperature for cooling.

Yes but they have a considerably larger surface area to radiate heat from compared to a traditional air cooling heat sink so it can radiate heat more effectively even if the temperature increases

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:19

trancesphere · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:21

TechMinerUK said:
Yes but they have a considerably larger surface area to radiate heat from compared to a traditional air cooling heat sink so it can radiate heat more effectively even if the temperature increases

What about the (single) air cooled PSU?

What about other devices in the room (i.e. switches, routers).

Putting the money towards a replacement AC unit makes more sense.

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:28

TechMinerUK · 7 Feb 2016 at 18:45

rpggamesplayer said:
Thanks dude much appreciated, one case contains rads pumps and res, if there would be a leak it would be from that case this case will stay at the bottom of the rack with holes underneath to drop into a container, the qdc's will help during maintance as I have put together a moduler designed rad pump and res that will plug to a socket and join in seconds so no downtime during maintenance or disaster, dual d5 pumps in case of pump failure and a spare pump always sitting on our modular unit.

So it's all in the design then, excellent. It must have required slightly more planning compared to a normal loop then to get it past the boss, especially with the setup to ensure maximum uptime with little/no down time

Semple · 7 Feb 2016 at 19:19

Certainly something different! and does look pretty cool!

But i'm not entirely convinced a lot of companies are going this route.

We've had a recent state of the art datacenter built at work, and they spared no expense building it. That still runs on AC. There's a lot of redundant AC units, but i'd hate to thing of the additional cost of watercooling x-thousand servers.

rpggamesplayer · 7 Feb 2016 at 20:11

Cenedd · 7 Feb 2016 at 21:51

Roverno said:
Some people sit and wait for 20-30 minutes for their profile to load. As far as i can tell, its a full gigabit network, thats what the connection reports in windows so that interface should not be the problem.

I believe that roaming profile transfer rates are deliberately throttled. Presumably so that multiple people logging in at the same time doesn't cripple performance for all. You're better using folder redirection to move all the docs, desktop, pictures etc out so that they're protected. Offline files can (by default) make that available offline. Then if you must use roaming profiles the size will be much reduced - although it's still preferable not to if you can help it.