Slashdot Mirror
Rack Mounted PCs for the Home User?
andrewa writes "Do any folks out there have recommendations on available gear for building a small, but extendable, rack-mounted system? As a developer of software for use in contact centers I want to put together a small development system that consists of at least three PCs to create a simulated environment to test my applications in.
Why rack mounted? Well, I want to save space and only have the bare minimum systems (no need for multiple CD-ROMS, monitors, no sound-cards, just lots of memory and HD space).
I also will add to this in the future, so don't want to limit myself to just a few pcs on the system. I've scouted around a bit, but didn't see too much. I'm in the UK at the moment, but will be moving to the U.S. in about 6 months, so power requirements (although I guess most equipment has switchable voltages) is a consideration."
Couple of thoughts here on this as I've done what your looking to do. First suggestion is wait to buy your stuff until you get here in the US to save yourself shipping fees and possible import duties. Once your here and settled look on ebay for a local auction so that you don't have to have the rack shared.
Going back to school to pick up Cisco and SUN I wanted a rack to hold all the requisite lab equipment for my sandbox - and I thought it would be nifty. I did this last summer and I was able to buy a 42u rack for $100 by watching a week for a local rack on ebay and avoided $200 in shipping fees. Of course no data center I have ever seen was willing to personalize their their rack by painting it metallic green like I did:)
When your buying your rack mount systems bear in mind that 1u cases tend to cost a lot more and have lower capacity. If you have the room, and at home you should, buy either a 3u or 4u rack case and then you don't have to use low profile memory, cards, power supplies and the like that are a fair bit more expensive than standard issue fair.
You can easily get the 3u or 4u cases on ebay for the same price range as a normal computer case. However the rack mount keyboards, mice and monitors cost a pretty penny. If you buy a full rack it will be far cheaper to just by a couple rackmount shelfs and put an old 15" Monitor, KVM, Keyboard and still have plenty of room left over.
Also bear in mind your electric capacity with where you place it. In my experience you'll get around 6-8 systems for a LAN party on your standard 15 amp outlet before blowing the circuit. If you can put it on a circuit that is as isolated as you can make it.
I have good luck with a mixture of Virtual PC for Macs and VMWare for Linux. VPC doesn't run on the G5s yet, though.
Maybe a virtual solution will work for you?
I currently work with servers, specifically rackmounted servers. I can tell you that for home use they are not worth the effort. For one thing heat is a big issue. Its no longer trivial to add some case fans to the back and let the air flow freely. You also can not use standard heatsinks because they will not fit in a 1U case.
The main and possibly only benefit of the rackmounted server is because it saves space. This is essential when putting servers in a datacenter as they charge you for how much space you use.
If you are not going to put the servers into a datacenter just put the computer in a standard case which is about (4U) and save yourself the $300-$600 that a rackmount case will set you back alone.
Middle Atlantic Products makes some nice, inexpensive rack hardware in their musician's section that's suitable for a home rack. I have one of their 36" racks and its served me well. In it I have racked a few homebrew PC's, mostly with rack-mount cases purchased from NewEgg. Decent rack-mount cases, not overly priced, and many will take standard sized motherboards and power supplies.
HP's got some really cheap (sub $2000) rackmountable hardware available, with decent specs. They are intel based, so could run Linux, Solaris x86, or if you must W2k, W2k3.
e rvers/prolian tdl140/index.html
Checkout the Proliant's:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/s
That's not to bad for the hardware.
Rackmount? For 3 pcs? Something small? Bad idea. Mini-ITX or or microATX is the way to go. Small boxes like this:
e sc ription=56-101-430&depa=0
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?d
Racks themselves are expensive. Figure on a $250 minimum investment. Then a $100 minimum case cost.
I've got a number of skyhawk 4U cases in a 48U rack. It works for me, especially with all my AV gear in lockdown shelves. Works for me, YMMV.
The thing about rackmounts is that they're terribly noisy, especially 1U units, because they've got numerous, small, high-rpm fans. It's a real cacaphony of noise and heat so if you don't have a separate room for them, you'll get sick of them really quickly. There's also the price premium you pay for 1U cases and low-profile memory compared to normal parts. If you need multiple systems at home, I'd suggest mini-PC's from Shuttle. Small, quiet, and cheaper than rackmounts (slightly more than regular whitebox PCs). They're flat on top so they're very stackable... 3 or 4 of them would take up the space of a normal fullsize tower. They take normal PC components, and they have 100mbps network adapters built in (some of the high-end P4 units might have 1000mbps, I'm not sure) A barebones Shuttle w/ sound, network, and video costs between $220 and $400. After that cost you just need to drop in a CPU, ram, and disk drive. Quite affordable. At least one supercomputer cluster chose Shuttle PCs, I forget which one. This is my second Slashdot post in a few weeks extolling these things. I don't work for them, honest. I'm just a very satisfied customer. :P
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
They provide a fair amount of silence too (a bit of foam along the sides where it doesn't obstruct air flow dampens it a lot.
There's a switch, a terminal server, a patch panel, a router (IOS testing mostly), and 7 computers.
The patch panel is new and GLORIOUS. It means I have all the serial ports and network ports and ports for the rest of the house in one panel.
3 of these computer have rack ears. I found rack sliders, put 3/4" ply between them to make a pull out shelf and have a couple Sparc20s, a NeXT and an SGI sitting sideways on them. beneath is another shelf with 2 tower cases sitting there.
Why not all rackable computers? mainly cost. An $80 case with an enermax or antec power supply (I'll *only* use Antec, but enermax was acceptable when it came with the case. The rest are crap. 5V should not be 4.6V when the graphics card get hammered). 2U rack cases (cheaper than 1U cause you get a bit of headroom and can use regular RAM) cost several hundred. The ones I have I got from a dot com moving from dozens of random machines to dozens of the same damn machines. I won; they became maintainable.
I like 4 post racks. The shelves made it easy to put stuff in. Relay racks (just the front ears) work for many people to. If you have another room for the 'puters, then you can consider it. Shouldn't cost more then 120 Euro really.
Make your own
Any pro audio store (PA systems, not CD players) can tell you where to get rack rails. All my pro audio gear was rackable and I have several 4U (not deep enough for 'puters) road cases. So go buy a pair or 3' tall rails and build a nice box out of HEAVY ply. It will meet all your needs. If not, any carpenter should be able to build you a box for a few quid.
When we did our house, I had a choice. We could afford a rack, or a few ebay rack mount cases (the 30 dollar 4u jobbies that were around a little bit ago). We went with the cases and I built a rack out of 2x4s and 1x2s
www.linux-skunkworks.com
Eastern Pennsylvania. Any day, any time. You gotta help drag it out. Contact me. Bring a pickup truck. Used to house ooooooold DECtalk gear. Still has 1 4U DECtalk unit installed, if you ever wanted to do text-to-voice with DTMF readback over 8 phone lines at once.
I also am a strong proponent of virtualization if possible. I'm up to about 15 virtual machines running under VMWare ESX, and I started a new box intended to run Linux VMs using usermode linux. Now that "virtualization" is a key buzzword for 2004, I don't think I'll ever get around to populating the rack with gear. Get it out of my house.
Intelligent Life on Earth
My home rack has been working great.
:)
First, be carefull about where you put it. Mine is tucked away under the stairs in the basement. A 19" rack fit perfecly in the closet that I built around it. I have an automatic dehumidfier and some (motherboard based hacked) temperature sensors, and a bathroom ventalation fan. When I'm in the basement, I can't hear anything at all.
Next, buy yourslef a CAT 5 KVM Extender. It is absolutly indespensable. I very rarely have to go down to manually press a button and the KVM extender has eliminated the need for an expensive rack mount keyboard and monitor. I just have a cheap KVM switch connected to my family rig in the den.
I agree with other posters, go buy a 4U rackmount case and make sure that you have at least a couple of rack mount shelves for routers and other misc stuff.
The neighbours all know that I work as a geek, but showing them my Rack when they come over demonstrates that I live like one too
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
I got lucky. A company I had connections to
dumped a bunch of older equipment, and I managed
to get a very nice full size rack, for free!
that said...
rack stuff is more expensive, though it's getting
less so.
put the rack on casters, and make sure that they
are rated to carry the weight of your rack
maxed out with equipment.
I love this. Combined with hard floors, it
makes it very easy to pull the rack away from
the wall to make changes, or clean under it.
*** Make sure the combined height is less
than the doorway. This will allow you to
move it out of the room for painting or other
room maintenance. In fact, when I got the
rack, I put my desk and two file cabinets on
casters, too.
Get rails for the cases. I leave the case lid
screws off, too. Makes it very easy to slide
out the cases and pop the lids for changes and
maintenance.
Be sure to make cables long enough to
accomodate the length needed when the cases
are fully pulled out.
Tiewrap cables that can be pulled out,
(i.e., usb, keyboard, mouse) to the back
of the case to act as strain relief when
sliding the case.
Check the alignment of the rails that the
equipment screws into, left to right, front
to back. Use a couple of 2U blanks at the
top and bottom.
When I built my first rack case 5 or 6 years
ago there weren't as many choices, seemingly,
for manufacturers as now, and I over did it
with a big Sliger. Since then I've built a
couple more using Compute-Aid 4U boxen
http://www.compute-aid.com/
which are well built and fairly priced,
though it's been of couple years since I checked
them out.
Heating isn't a problem with 4U cases.
ATX mobo's leave plenty of room for chassis
fans. Cases frequently can be ordered with
a cross brace that accomodates additional
chassis fans.
Try and keep the heavy stuff near the bottom.
For me, top to (near) bottom:
ham radio stuff
17" monitor for the router box
(I'd love to change this to an lcd,
but they're too much money)
mini-keyboard for the router on sliding
shelf
1U shelf for the dsl box
1U shelf for the 8 port hub
workstation 4U box
old workstation now file server 4U box
router 4U box
APC rackmount UPS (heaviest of all)
That's all I can think of.
Good luck
My suggestion is that you look on ebay for a rack cabinet. I just bought two of them on there for $50.00 each. One was a Sun Storage Array which probably cost over $1,000.00 new. The other was some generic cabinet, but both are perfectly functional. The Sun is too large for the house, but the other easily fits in a closet I use for my servers.
Cases can easily be found brand new on PriceWatch for under $100.00. Sometimes you can find them for under $70.00. You can also buy used cases on ebay fairly cheaply.
One additional think to think of is this. It strikes me that with some aluminum angle shelving material from Lowes, a drill, and some bolts, you could easily make a rack frame to put rack cases in. I also think that some heavy drawer rails would work as well as the server rack rails folks sell, which you cna also pick up cheaply on ebay.
Alcmaon
I recently had to set up a mini-cluster for my department. We looked into rack mounts, but finally decided to go with micro-ATX PCs housed in a standard bookshelf. The main reason for our decision was that 1U servers are very expensive, hot, and noisy. 2U cases are better, and you can use off-the-shelf components, but 2U offers no space savings over micro-ATX.
We found micro-ATX motherboards with dual DDR and gigabit ethernet built-in. Micro-ATX cases are cheap, and you can get solid 300 watt power supplies for them. Additionally, we can if needed fit in 3 standard PCI cards.
So, we decided to get 15 micro-ATX PCs, and house them in 3 shelves of a standard 2 1/2' (w) x 6 1/2' (h) bookshelf. The PCs sit backwards so all the ports face out. There's still space for another 10 PC's in the bookshelf. Compare this with only 20 2U cases in a standard rack.
My recommendation, go with micro-ATX PCs, unless you really need an ATX sized motherboard. It'll be easier to deal with and will save you a bunch of money over rack mounts.
Good points all around in parent post. Additional thoughts from my own experience:
As others have pointed out, another problem with 1U/2U rack cases is the noise. They typically use 40mm/50mm case fans, and the sound of those poor little guys whirring their hearts out is like living in an airport. While you might be able to tolerate this with a single computer, once you stack up 3/4/5 machines, the noise levels can become remarkably unpleasant. After 3 months of insomnia, I chucked those cases in the closet and replanted everything in 4U cases. (I've since seen low-noise 40mm Pabst fans popping up every now and then -- the airflow is much lower than the turboprop-wannabe stock fans, but I'm tempted to pick up a few of these, bring the 1U case out of storage, and give it another shot -- for a minimal single-CPU/single-drive system, the reduced airflow should still be sufficient.)
4U cases, OTOH, are much easier to quiet down. These typically use 80mm or 90mm case fans, and many have mount points for a couple of 60mm fans on the back. There's a variety of low-noise 80/90mm fans on the market. Not quite as wide a selection in the 60mm range, but they're not particularly difficult to find if you need the extra airflow. (FWIW, I've been happy with the Vantec Stealth line.)
The parent poster's comment about 4Us taking standard power supplies is good to keep in mind. The PS in a 1U/2U case is going to be a nonstandard size -- which can be a killer if it dies on you. With the standard-sized ATX PS used in a 4U case, if you lose a PS you can pop down to your local computer supply store, buy a replacement, and be back up and running in no time.
If you're running Linux, you can manage without a KVM once your machines are set up and running properly, since you can always forward X sessons from multiple boxes over to whichever machine your monitor is connected to. That being said, a KVM is awfully handy if you need control over a machine during the early boot stages -- you can't get to the BIOS settings display using X forwarding. :-)
Personal preference I've developed regarding rails is to use the 26" rails even though most 4U cases are only 20" deep. The longer rails make it more awkward when you first put the case in the rack (since they stick out past the ends of the case), but afterwards they'll let you slide the case out far enough that you can get to the connectors on the back. (Like flipping off the switch on the power supply or unplugging the cord while you're working inside the machine.) I find that being able to do all the work from the front of the rack is more convenient than having to hop back and forth between the front and rear to yank things off and plug things back in again. If you rarely work inside your case, it's not a big deal -- save a few bucks and go for shorter rails, or even skip the rails completely and bolt the case directly to the rack.
You mentioned lots of HD space. If you're planning something serious, like a 4+ drive RAID configuration, pay close attention to mountpoints and airflow. Many entry-model 4U cases only have 2 mount points for hard drives. You can pick up 3.5-5.25" adapter brackets that'll let you mount additional drives in the 5.25" external bays -- there's usually 3 external bays on an entry-level 4U case. If you pick up one of the inserts that fit into the 3 external bay area and allow you to mount 5 hard drives sidways, be very *very* cautious if you're using 7200 RPM drives. Those drives run hot normally, and there's almost no space between the drives in these inserts, hence little room for airflow. You'll want a dedicated cooling fan, preferably built into the rear of the insert, or you're going to run a real risk of the drives quickly overheating and dying. (Been there, fried that, bought new drives.)
Oh yes, and something that drove me crazy for a while -- if you pick up a second-hand rack and the mou
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Instead of making stupid comments regarding VMWare or laptops, here is something that will actually help you out. I just completed my rack a few months ago. Building a home rack is not that expensive but you will need to look around because most of the rackmount products are business oriented and they seem to be more expensive. Here are the links to the stuff I used. Some of the prices may be slightly off (previous slashdot post) but you should be able to track down most of the stuff. I do agree with the posts regarding the 1U servers it will be much easier for you to stick with 2U and up servers, the extra space makes it much easier and cheaper to work with. Some of the links are not quite working (l-com and bestbuy) but I think it is from problems on the vendors website, hopefully they will work tomorrow or I will post new links.
Relay rack 38U steel, with base (should fit under a doorway with casters)
129.00 - Rack
60.00 - Base(Freestanding Application)
40.00 - Casters
Rackmount Computer Case
130.00 - Computer Case
30.00 - Power Supply (300 Watt)
LCD / KVM Switch / Mounting (need to make custom rack mount for LCD Swivel)
1200.00 - LCD Monitor (21")
41.49 - LCD Swivel [cyberguys.com]
119.95 - Rack Mount KVM (8 Port)
18.99 - KVM Cables [techdepot.com]
Rack Mount UPS
249.99 - UPS 1500VA CyberPower 1500AVR(free shipping from BestBuy, easy to return if problems, not cheapest price)
Hope that helps,
Jad
Get a mainboard that supports serial console redirection, like the Tyan Tomcat i875P, and hook the (first) serial port up to a multi-serial board in another box, or get the excellent (but expensive) Cyclades TS-Series console server.
We just picked up four of them as firewalls (in 1U cases from Chenbro) as well a backup server, and the redirection works like a charm.