Server Room rearrangement - opinions wanted.

[maniac]

Below is a (admitendly poor quality) photograph of the server room in one of the academies I look ater.

 

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/DSC00475.jpg

 

Now we've been sorting the patching all of today, all new patch leads routed properly into the cable management and colour coded according to purpose - the two furthest left hand cabinets are the main comms cabinets for the school and now look much neater. The next one over houses equipment for the on-site LEA run library and a few other miscilanious items of comms equipment, plus a few servers that we can't fit in anywhere else. The furthest right hand cabinet which you can just see contains nothing more than one fibre patch panel and one copper patch panel - this is labelled 'radio' and was intended to house equipment for the on-site radio station - however this is now housed in it's own cabinet in its own comms room away from our server room, just simply the telephones are patched through this panel for the station.

 

Then as you can see the one and only server rack is immediately on your left as you enter the room, to the extent that you're almost in the way of the door when your standing at it - the photo was taken standing at the door. I think it's a rubbish location for a server rack, and my idea is to do away with the comms cabinet labelled 'radio' moving the two patch panels into the adjacent cabinet which would be easy to do, then place the server rack where this was, thus making one line of cabinets and feeing up some much needed space we can use for storage. We have a raised floor in the room, so cabling for power etc. is no issue, it's already provided by commando sockets under the floor which are in reach of the new location, so theoretically it could be done.

 

The question is given the amount of work involved, if you were in charge, would you bother?

 

Opinions needed!

 

cheers,

 

Mike.

Edited December 19, 2011 by maniac

[6Foot2]

We are in the middle of re-arranging our server room. I have to be honest if I could avoid it I would. However:

 

 

1. I have to move a server from my office [its temporary home for the past 4 months] to the server room.
   
2. I have to move the servers in the server room from racking that is not fit for purpose to a server proper cabinet.
   
3. There is a fault in the electrical supply that to be traced needs the power turned off. So now is a good time to re-organise the server room.
   

 

Given the choice I would not be doing this as it does not add functionality/reliability to the network but for the reasons given above we have to do it.

[michael2k6]

Yeh, i'd feel much more at home afterwards.