A Six Month Redux After Building A 60+ System Basement Server/Computer Room
One of the few downsides though is in having under-estimated the heat output. Even with air conditioning, a small window during the cooler weather, and a power vent to draw in cooler air from the rest of the house, the basement is still 75-80F (23~26C) on a daily basis. I'm still figuring out other ways to cool it, but at least we should have a lot of free heat in the winter months ahead!
Of course, another major expected downside is the power-use. The current power use for the ~60 systems running daily is about 3,000 kWh a month, including the air conditioning. The electrical costs over the past six months are already greater than what it cost me when building out this server room myself.
Managing all of the systems is our open-source Phoronix Test Suite's Phoromatic server and client software. The Phoromatic Server triggers all of the tests to start on the respective system(s), is responsible for automatically turning the systems on and off (those that support WoL or other power interfaces), monitoring the system logs and other vitals, and all of the other benchmarking tasks.
Over 372,000 benchmarks have been done so far from this server room in the half-year it's been operational for Phoronix! All the tests are fully-automated and made easy thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic.