A good rack mount system?

[Guest]

I am planning on upgrading my five computer cases to a rack mount system. With in the next few days I plan on purchasing a 42U (or smaller) rack case and some ATX cases.

The 42U case I am looking at is a Dell
http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/products_rck_pedge_002_rack.htm

As for the ATX cases, I plan on looking around on eBay.

I am really going about this blindly... I have spent a few weeks researching the whole rack system but have not come across any real useful information. Does anyone have any advice they could give me before I go spend over a grand ?

 

[Guest]

There are two ways to go about this. You could either invest in a telco-style rack which is basically two vertical posts bolted into the floor (it resembles a 19" wide doorway of burnished aluminum) and you mount your cases in the rack by mounting brackets about halfway down its length.

This way is really cheap, but for stability purposes it's bolted into the floor, so it might not be that great in a SoHo environment.

A great enclosed rack is made my APC (the makers of the famous UPS). Check it out at:

http://www.apcc.com/products/enclosures.cfm

They've got all kinds of accessories to sweeten up cable and power management for your rack.

While you are there, invest in an APC 2200RM UPS with the ethernet SNMP adapter and mount the thing at the bottom of your rack (cos it's so heavy - like 70 pounds). Then mount a switch above that to connect all your boxes into it. Then mount A rack-mount KVM switch.

Then mount your boxes, and plug in their cat-5 cables into the switch, their devices into the KVM and their power into the UPS. This way all you have coming out of the rack is a single power line, a single cat-5 cable and a single set of KVM wires.

The SNMP ethernet adapter is used to send out a broadcast to all machines set to listen to the UPS for power updates. This little gewgad can be set to shutdown all devices plugged into it over the network.


I hope this helps.


Ciyio