When I arrived in this job the half dozen servers were spread across four tables in a cramped room with a window air conditioning unit. The room was a tangle of wires; the UPS that was physically closest to a server was not necessarily the one it was plugged into. There were ethernet cables being strung in from other offices via the hung ceiling.
Doing something about the room was immediately put onto my list of big projects. While I am pretty sure every good admin dreams of nicely rackmounting everything, it can be an expensive route to take. With a good rack running $800 and rack mount equipment for servers costing $100-$200 per server, the costs add up quickly. The per server cost is reduced if the rack mounting hardware is purchased with the server. Racks are unfortunately not really an option for me however.
The initial cost (which I estimated at $2200) was only a small part of my decision to not rackmount everything. My biggest reasons for going with strong shelving instead of a rack was the need for flexibility and the lack of need for density. Racks make packing many servers into a very small space easy. I have plenty of space and no need for more than about 10 servers at any one time. Flexibility was really the deal breaker for me.
We had (and still have) a strange collection of servers and related hardware. With good shelves I don't need to worry about how or where I will store something when I consider a purchase.
It has taken a good deal of patience and nearly a year, but the room is
almost organized.
The
shelving is Metro Super
Erecta. It's 30 inches deep, 74 inches high, and 60 inches wide. In
theory each shelf can hold 600 pounds. That does actually hold pretty
true in the real world. The heaviest loads should be closest to the
poles to avoid sagging in the shelves. Also important to note, is that
this is the commercial version of the Metro shelving and not the consumer
stuff you may have seen at your local mega-homestore.
The back
of the eight port KVM with neatly tied down cables. Nearly every wire on
the shelf is tied down with cable ties (yellow ones seen in this picture)
and labeled at both ends (white tags visible in this picture). The
labels were made with a Brother Ptouch 2600.
There is an
admin console and a KVM switch to access all of the servers and computers
on the shelf. The KVM is an 8 port Belkin (nothing designed for
rack mounting should use a wall wart).
There are five
UPSes on the middle shelf, four 1500A APC
SmartUPS and one 750VA one. We only need two of the four
1500VA UPSes to run all of the servers off of batteries for around 30
minutes. Having four means we can run off of batteries longer and it
means that we can have up to two fail without loss of protection (this
does assume as in our case that all of your servers have dual power
supplies and they are plugged into different UPSes). The 750VA UPS is
used to power the console and the in-room ethernet switch.
There
are still some wires to tie up and neaten. That should be easy to fix,
as soon I find a source for various lengths of decent power cords. The
window air conditioner is another matter all together. That is a
subject that shall be saved for another time.
