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Rack Mount BTX Case

Posted by Hemos on from the and-even-more-power-per-square-foot dept.

CoolTyler5 writes "The TechZone has posted some information on the world's first ever rackmount MicroBTX chassis. The new patent pending chassis, made by General Technics, allows for more powerful processors and storage capability with a smaller, quieter and cooler MicroBTX form factor. The manufacturer also claims it's nearly silent and at 16 inches deep, will fit into most short depth rack cabinets." Of course, the issue that we have at our data center is not really the physical space. Sure, we'd love more space but the power draw per square meter is at the county-maximum. It's great that we can cram more machines into a smaller foot print, but powering all of them is the issue.

4 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Patent pending? by Tet · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The new patent pending chassis [...]

    So let me get this straight. They've taken an industry standard form factor motherboard, and put it in an industry standard form factor rackmount case... and that's worthy of a patent?

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  2. Do you really want to get the best bang for the $? by Name+Anonymous · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Get a 1RU Sun Fire T1000 Server - 8 Core UltraSPARC processor with low power utilization .

    And it's only 19" deep. so that's really a lot of processing power in a small footprint.

    WHo needs a rackmount microBTX system to save space and energy?

  3. Re:Not very interesting... by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think BTX was ever meant for rack mount either, but rather consumer computers. There are other standardized form factors for that. Where BTX (or ATX) saves is using commodity parts, so you can make a cheap server.

    I'm not that convinced that BTX is really necessary other than to increase royalties to Intel. The full size ATX standard and cases could have been to provide most or all of the benefits of BTX. The mini and micro ATX standards failed, so I don't see what could be done with BTX that gets at the root of why mini and micro ATX standard failed.

  4. Regarding the power tangent by ChuckRoast · · Score: 2, Interesting
    We've been using virtualization technology for some time, but not on production server systems. We are considering doing that now for a variety of reasons (not the least of which include facilitating software upgrades and disaster recovery by leveraging the hardware abstraction layer). Because we run a [un?]healthy mix of operating systems, we are currently looking at VMware, but perhaps OSDN is in a position for considering Xen? It might well help your power needs scale much better.

    Isn't there some Computer Science adage about solving problems by adding another layer of abstraction?

    --
    Do we need more fiber to keep our network regular?