Advice needed on new "data center"

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S-F

Member
Feb 9, 2011
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I just signed the P&S on a house last week and will be passing final papers in a few more. My first order of business in the house is to finish the basement. Aside from super insulating it I will be taking this opportunity to network the whole house. I will also be building a dedicated room (small) for computer equipment. It will be located well away from any water bearing anything. I learned that lesson pretty thoroughly a month or so ago when I came home one afternoon to find the cold water valve to my kitchen sink failed and raining down on my gear, which was unintelligenty located right under it in the basement. At this point I'm considering wrapping the entire room on all six sides with bitchathane including a veritable marine bulkhead for a door. So I'm looking for some input from the community on how I should go about this procedure. I'm in a unique position as this will be new construction so I can basically do whatever I want.

First off, I am thinking I will wire the house with CAT 6. Here I only really have 2 options. The first is CAT 6 and the second is CAT 6 in conduit. Not using CAT 5E is a no brainer. If I install conduit I could easily upgrade the wiring at a later date. The conduit would only cost several hundred $ or less but would be a serious, SERIOUS PITA to install. I will be getting a Dell 2724 and my current system couldn't make any use of 10Gbe any way as I use WHS. But in the future 15 TB SSD's might be useless paperweights so it's wise to plan ahead.

Second is cooling. Since this is all going to be in a glorified closet heat will be a very real issue. I was thinking about having an intake and an exhaust fan for the room. The fans would be located well inside the room with waterproof duct work leading to the walls at a downward angle. Obviously the intake would be near the floor and the exhaust would be near the ceiling. Also I will probably be water cooling my main CPU with the heat being sunk geothermally. All of the computers in the house that produce any real heat will be on a single lop with ground source cooling. I'm not really open to the idea of air conditioning the room as it will be too small and the cost of the unit alone wouldn't make sense. Does anyone have any thoughts on the cooling issue? Any thoughts on how many air changes / hour I will need per Ft.3?

Third: Power and grounding. I have heard in passing some pretty involved business about grounding data centers. As I understand it a domestic ground comes by way of an 8’ copper rod driven into the ground. Obviously the ground bus in the breaker box is tried to such a contraption. There are circuit maps I have seen for domestic computer outlets utilizing 3 conductor romex to provide an extra grounding path attached to the outlet box. Sounds fine. I have also heard about the floors and so forth in a data center being grounded. Isn’t that what the static bracelets tie to? How the hell is this accomplished? What’s the goal here? It would be quite feasible for me to sink one or more additional ground spikes for the room alone. The room will be located next to an outside wall so I could go right through the band joist before I foam it up and clamp right on to a spike or two. I could tie these new grounds to all of the outlets in the room as well as the floor and shelves. Is there anything else that can be grounded directly? How about the cases? How about a UPS? I will probably run 2 20a circuits to the room. Another possibility is to have a 220 circuit in there. Can’t most power supplies run on 220 and run more efficiently?

If I defecated golden eggs I would just put this all in an underground monolithic dome with a lead cap and no water or combustibles but as things stand I’m a penniless philosopher so a small room in my basement will have to do. Currently my backup scheme revolves around close to 1,000 DVD’s containing my already encoded movies, the originals where available and incremental backups at a friend’s house over a sneakernet connection. I currently have about a dozen 2 TB drives for my WHS in a Norco 4224. The 4224 has turned out to have been a not so great purchase for me. I had been banking on Vail having DE so I could just keep adding drives until the case was full. Now I think I’m going to dedicate the current machine in the 4224 as a backup in the future and make a RAID 5 array of 6 X 3 or 4 TB drives for the main storage. Maybe the backup server will move to ZFS. I love the thought of ZFS but I don’t play nicely with Unix. And if anyone out there has any thoughts on things I haven’t thought of please chime in. I’m going to begin gathering materials for the renovation in the next couple weeks so I still have a little bit of time. Also if anyone knows of any resources out there please point me to them.

Thanks
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Cat6 is perfect. Conduit is probably overkill. It could be worth it in some places that are hard to pull (the major runs between floors, etc.). But for the most part, overkill.

Pull two separate Cat6 to each drop. Overkill, of course, but it will stop you from having to do it again later. Run 4 to anyplace where you are likely to have a lot of "stuff" (your office desk, study, whatever).

Grounding: where do you live? Are you lightning prone? Have lots of static? Unless you're in a really harsh place standard household ground is probably fine. Just make sure your household electrical is up to snuff and every outlet is properly grounded. Newer construction is probably fine, but if it is 30 years old or more you might want to have an electrician verify it.
 

S-F

Member
Feb 9, 2011
148
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Conduit is only overkill of 10Gbe is obsolete in the next 10 years. I only plan on staying in the house for about that long. And this is CAT 6 not 6 A. That's still OK? The house in only 1 story not including the basement so there will be no single paths full of cables between floors. They will all go directly from the patch panel to their respective destinations. I just want to be clear that the ceiling in the basement will be finished with drywall. I am going to mud and tape this ceiling but then I'm going to hang up my spurs. I dislike finishing drywall and have had enough of it. So I don't want to be revisiting this job in 7 years. I have wired my current house. It took me months. I did a lot of drywall work and I estimate that it has shortened my lifespan by a decent 5 years. My next house, which I plan to begin construction on when I locate a suitable plot of land, will certainly be all conduit.

As for the power, I will be wiring this room so everything will be grounded to code. No K&T wiring or anything like that. I have been through the house with a fine tooth comb and there is no K&T or armored wiring left in the house at all even though it was built in the 50's. Someone sometime must have taken care of that. I also plan to install a whole house surge protector. If lightning strikes it will probably hit one of the adjacent trees as the house is pretty low to the ground. You don't think extra grounding measures are necessary or useful? What's the reasoning for this kind of thing in a data center then? My thought is if I'm going to do it I might as well do it right. I live in Western MA BTW.

Thanks for the input PigLover.
 

nitrobass24

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Dec 26, 2010
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I would say Cat6 is fine...if you are good with 10gbps in 10 years then do that.

You could put Fiber instead of copper for everything and get Media converters/baluns for Coax, HDMI, Speakers, RJ-45, RJ-11,IR. That way any drop can be any type of connection you want and can be easily changed.

Initial Layout would be expensive....but you could upgrade to anything that will come out in the next 10-20 years.
Want 20Gbe....just get a new NIC :)

And YES this is way overkill...hell having a DC at home is overkill who are you kidding. :)
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Per specs, Cat6 is fine even for 10Gbe on runs up to 55m. You only need Cat6a for runs between 55-100m. It would have to be one hell of a 1-story house for you to have any runs over 55m ;).

The extra care in grounding done in data centers has a lot more to do with various power distribution systems used in the facility. As long as you are distributing using standard household design rules you will be fine.
 

apnar

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Mar 5, 2011
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I'm not an electrician, although I've played one on TV, and I believe you really should only have 1 ground. So you don't want to have separate grounding rods for just your data center area unless they are property connected to the ground for your house. There is the possibility that the electrical potential would be slightly different which would cause difference between the two grounds making really weird things happen.

What you can do if you're concerned about grounding is put more grounding rods in for your normal house setup. Instead of the usual 2, stick in 3, 4 or 5 rods along the copper wire spaced out at 5 to 6 feet between them. It'll give your whole house better grounding. You can still ground most any of those things you mentioned, just tie them to the house ground.

I agree with the comment on multiple Cat-6 runs. You can never have too many and these days you can run most anything over some number of Cat-X lines. Also, be sure to run a few to your demark point to bring in phone, internet, cable, etc. Conduit is "future proof" but as you mention is a pain. It seems to me that most new technologies some how always find a way to get passed over Cat-X lines as that's what many business have deployed.
 
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S-F

Member
Feb 9, 2011
148
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Well then CAT 6 it shall be. Any thoughts on cooling? How many air changes per hour do you think the room should have? And does anyone have any thoughts about 220?