Noisy server rooms

Are everyone else's server rooms noisy?

Do you have continuous sound metering, do you put meters in from time to time, or do you just put up with it?

Does anyone wear ear protectors in a server room?

Even though a server room isn't unbearably loud, it's noticeable at least. I've spent a few days in our server room at the datacenter a while (=2 years) ago because everything went very bad when one of the juniors hooked up an insecure windows server into the domain (woopeee, reinstall the domain :/). I play drums myself, so I have very nice ear protection. I brought those on the second day, and I noticed a very big difference in my condition at the end of the day. On the first day, I was a wreck. The constant noise, even though you don't really notice it after a while, really wears you out physically. With the earplugs everything is so much more relaxed.

I can really recommend buying a set of earplugs with a separate filter, something like these. You don't want el-cheapo earplugs, because you'll have to replace them too often. Getting a set of these with interchangeable filters works for more than just the datacenter. At a music concert for instance, or when you have to go to other noisy (maybe louder) environments.

Depends on the numbers of servers vs. the space. When we built out a small test lab with a few servers in the racks, it wasn't so noisy. Now that it's fully populated, it is. Those fans create a lot of noise. In our case, I don't think we actively do sound monitoring because there's not a whole lot you can do about the noise. So we just put up with it.

And while it's annoying, I don't know anyone who wears ear protectors. Then again, our time in the server room is often limited to physical hardware installs. We use remote desktop and SSH to connect to our servers from our desks or our IP-based KVM solutions (which can virtual mount CD/DVDs).