[geeks] Advice for server room cooling/fire control

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Nathan Raymond <nate at portents.com>
> Date: 2004/10/05 Tue PM 06:40:32 GMT
> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: [geeks] Advice for server room cooling/fire control
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if the collective intelligence and experience of this list 
> can help me out or point me in the right direction.  I'm the admin at a 
> company that has a server room/storage room where everything environmental 
> is an afterthought.  The building is an old mill building, 20ft ceilings. 
> The climate control is a ceiling mounted cooling/heating unit outside the 
> server room with the thermostat in the CEO's office and vents that go to 
> several places besides the server room, which seems to get very little of 
> what's left over of the cooling.  Cooling is also on a timer to save 
> energy, so during summer nights the server room simply cooks.  Fire 
> control is a ceiling mounted sprinkler system that's the same as what rus 
> through the rest of the office.
> 
> All far from ideal.  I need to come up with financial justificatoins for 
> why thigns should change - where can I go for costs (costs of what would 
> happen if we don't change the setup, costs of what would happen if we do 
> make changes and what would be saved in the case of disaster)?  I don't 
> really know where to start with this.

I wonder if the company's Insurance Agent could help in this effort? They are the ones on the hook if there is a problem, and they can probably provide info to make intelligent decisions... You will, of course, run the risk of them saying everything is fine *or* saying things are so bad that they drop insurance coverage for the IT equipment.

The reality may be that if your environment is so far out of acceptable norms, you may not actually have any coverage for your IT infrastructure, despite your on-going premium payments...

IANAIA (I Am Not An Insurance Agent), this is just my opinion...