Just doing some forward thinking. when new budgets come out, I will be upgrading / purchasing some servers. Our server room is starting to look a *little* crowded now, making rack mountable servers seem very tempting.
If anybody has any experience of these your thoughts/experiences are greatly appreciated.......
You mean you don't already have a rack/cabinet? :shock:
Not for servers, no. The network & infrastructure i inherited wasnt that good. In my time here, in current post, i've only managed to pursuade SMT to let me buy one new server, although with everything i've done in the last year i think they will back up anything i say as long as i provide sound reasoning for it.
We have one cabinet and its getting kinda full. So much neater and easier to manage
Any issues with heat generated by the servers? Should a gap for ventilation be left between them or are the ok stacked as tightly as possible?
Rack mount servers are definitely better in terms of space taken up but do remember that you need a big cabinet (much deeper than the kind you put switches etc in)
If you buy Dell servers you need to make sure that you get the mounting rails for a standard 19" cabinet - they're not supplied as standard.
You'll also need to make sure you've got good cooling in the room - the servers generally have good fans but the hot air they push out has to be able to go somewhere.
Depending on what you're wanting to do you might have to start looking at SANs (if you don't already have one). The small size of most rack mount servers means you can't put more than 2 or 3 hard discs in them. That may not be a problem but you need to think about it!
Blade servers give even better density (10 blades fit in a 7U space) but are pretty expensive unless you're going to need 10 servers. (or you get the deal we had from Dell last year where 1 blade plus chassis cost us £2)
£2????? i want that deal! i'll have 50 of them!Originally Posted by srochford
The last dell rackmount I bought they sent me all three different rails. It still took me a while to figure out which ones to use though as they look nothing like my others :P
Speaking of Dell...
Our cabinet is fairly large (door frames had to be removed to get it in!) and has all of our core servers in it with room to spare. It does have 4 fans at the top but because we don't have air conditioning the room gets 'rather warm'.
If you go ahead with one, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it
I prefered "theDailyWTF" name myself......
Actually on a side note webman, i showed SMT your website today as a good example of website layout, and content.... just thought you might like to know...
Back to thread: I'm looking at HP Blade servers, but am i right in thinking you must have the blade system housing as this works out a bit dear....
Also watch out for the power supply requirements for blade chassis... some require 16 amp supplies, which you may not have / be able to put in easily!
Blades are pretty pricey still and when you consider how much power you can get out of a 1u server nowadays, it is hard to justify the cost unless you have a fancy VM setup.
Blades also produce a lot of heat in a small space which should be taken into consideration.
I have 11 servers, 1 switch, 1x AX100, 1 fibre SAN switch, a 9u UPS, a BlueSocket controller and a couple of KVMs in my main server rack. This has a 4-way fan tray on top of it and is in an air conditioned room (at approx. 18 degrees). Inside the rack it is currently 25.5 degrees (according to the temp sensor on my UPS manglement card).
We got a nice IBMBladeserver. very nice management console.
IMO it's worth it if you have a commitment to upgrade in the future and populate the bladeserver - this will save money. If next year and the year after managment decide they don't want to populate the server then obviously it will be a waste. We use it as a citrix farm - but SAN switch modules are available and blades are a good route to virtualisation
Could you not get some mounting rails for a a normal server chassis and then stick that in the rack?
I'm thinking Rack mounted is definately the way to go. Just so many different options.
No fancy VM setup here yet. I can prob find funding immediately for 2 servers: 1 webserver, 1 for CMIS, in 6 months time depending on plans/costings/suitability we might be going the route of thin clients, especially in rooms where the most they will do is word process / internet / etc. so we would be looking at 1-2 [2x3GHz dual core, 4GB RAM] servers in there for that (figuring 1 of those for 30 thin clients, that about right ric_ or is it overkill?) So we're looking at 4 servers in the next 12 months.
All our cabling \switch racks are full so we would need a new cabinet installed. I'm figuring why not go the whole way and get something like a HP BladeSystem c class. Something to REALLY kick a$$.
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