Dedicated Servers, Please be Quieter While you Serve Web Pages

Besides conserving energy, a critical goal in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and power consumption to save costs, a datacenter facility also strives to reduce noise – a complex and tricky task.

Datacenters contain thousands of small computer fans, which hum and blow air, creating an ambient noise.  Midphase datacenter engineers are always trying to find ways to control and modify the ambient noise using Active Noise Control (ANC) techniques.
Huge cooling fans push cold air over the dense and powerful computing platforms that drive thousands of websites in the Midphase-hosting environment. The noise generated from thousands of these servers and fans can affect both employees and surrounding personnel.
While reducing ambient noise is not considered a top priority, it does improve the overall efficiency of a facility and improves the working conditions of all those who contribute to server uptime.
Working with Dr. Scott Sommerfeldt of Brigham Young University’s Acoustics Research Group, C7, data engineers conducted a complex study with a key step requiring a collection of acoustic data present at the server room.

This data was crucial in determining what frequencies contained the most energy and were integral for use in the computational models and the experimental mockups.
Here are some methods and guidelines put into practice by our Utah datacenter engineering teams to reduce ambient noise.

• The materials used must disperse heat well and cannot disrupt air flow on the datacenter floor.
• The room has a concrete and corrugated metal ceiling, a raised floor and hard, flat walls that do not absorb sound well.
• Materials used to control or modify the sound cannot set off the sensitive, very early warning, fire detection systems or other sensors throughout the data center.
• No modifications to the equipment in the room may be made.
• The solution has to be cost effective and easy to implement and maintain.

While ANC won’t directly affect your hosting experience it makes happier data center engineers. And we all know, a happy geek is a good geek.