Newsgroups: alt.engineering.electrical
Subject: Re: Power room close to server room
References: <[email protected]>
"b"  writes:

> Hello All:
> 
> I have a question that maybe this group can awnser for me.
> I plan to install a server room in a new building in the near future.
> My main location however is 10 ft away from the building power breaker.
> The question being will the high level of voltage affect the servers i
> plan to install.

Usually the voltages on the building power breaker are not the problem 
on such situation. 

What could be problem could be the magnetic fields from the high power 
carrying cables and power rails in the power breaker panel. 

Typically the magnetic fields are not strong enough to harm 
hard disks etc.. that are inside the PCs. But the magnetic 
field could be string enough to make traditional CRT display 
unuseable (typically image shaking etc. problems). 
I have seen that personally happen around 15 years ago on one 
site where the house main distribution panel (230V/400V AC power 
at few hundred amperes) was on the other side of one of the 
wall in computer room. The monitors near that wall had very 
much shaking images in them, point of text being unreadable 
on screen. Installing some iron or steel plates (few mm thick
if I remember right) on the computer room wall helped situation 
somewhat, but did not completely cure the problem. 

Moving the monitors to other location (few meters away) 
and doing operation with help of KVM switch solved the problem. 
Servers worked nicely there without any special problems.


-- 
Tomi Engdahl (http://www.iki.fi/then/)
Take a look at my electronics web links and documents at 
http://www.epanorama.net/