Life of a Sysadmin

The occassional trials and tribulations of a jack of all tr ades sysadmin in a startup in Silicon Valley

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July 2007 (1)
June 2007 (5)
May 2007 (5)
April 2007 (3)
March 2007 (7)
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January 2007 (3)
December 2006 (4)
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January 2006 (7)
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August 2005 (1)
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May 2005 (4)
April 2005 (1)
March 2005 (2)

June 2007

Server Lifts, or How to mount heavy server in a rack

Sitting in our server room right now is a new 250 lb toy. I spent a few minutes this afternoon contemplating how exactly we were going tolift that thing onto the rails (it doesn't help that I'm not particularly confident that the provided sliding rails will work as advertised).

I brought this problem up to a friend who works in a large datacenter. He told me of the existance of lifts built to ease the process of hefting large servers into a rack. The only such lift that I could find advertised for sale is one from Server Life Corporation (which seems to cost about $8k). IBM makes reference to a support document pdf doc. Not quite designed for racking servers, but R on I's Lift-o-flex line looks to be a reasonable compromise of function to cost (under $1000 for the largest ones).

Not having a large enough serverroom to justify even the Lift-O-Flex (and certainly not being patient enough to attempt to acquire one before using the new toy), I recruited a couple of burly co-workers and it was heaved 10 inches up and two feet back onto the rails without much difficultly.