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Rack Mount BTX Case
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.
This may not be relevant to those of you who work in large data centres, but for those of us in smaller shops with a few servers in a small rack, being able to fit a more powerful server into less space is useful.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
OK, this is a little off topic. I'm supposed to trust information from a web site called "The Tech Zone" that allows those fake ad dialog boxes saying, "Your computer may be infected with harmful spyware programs..."? Shady.
Bradley Holt
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
Fill half your data center, use the rest to house illegal immigrants or store cia!is pills for $$profit$$.
Beep beep.
"...but we try not to indulge in naval gazing."
1. Firstly, how does a blatant advertisement like this get posted in the first place?
2. It's only 16" deep, but it's THREE RU tall. Where's this "space savings" they're talking about? 1/2RU, 1RU, and blade servers are where it's at for saving space.
Happy Boxing Day!
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?
It looks like it's 2 5 1/4" drives tall, which is usually a 2u case, but regardless, that's important info that's omitted in this article. More importantly, however, is the utter lack, it seems, of hot swapping. Yeah, it's got 5 drive bays, but if you've got to power down the server to swap a bad disk out, what's the point? The writer seemed to be more about "oooh shiney" and less about the things that actually matter in a server room.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Yeah -- not that useful for a data center because space is no longer the big issue for a lot of people.
But for musicians, having a quiet machine that sits in a rack that isn't too deep means I can put a system in the same rack as the rest of my gear. Can you say portable pro-tools? and for my home setup, I've got 3 or 4 systems. For years I've wanted to get them all rack-mount so that they can be in a neat stack rather than sitting on the floor under desks... but then i stop when I realize how loud rackmount systems are.
So it's useful for some poeople I think.
Isn't there some Computer Science adage about solving problems by adding another layer of abstraction?
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Do we need more fiber to keep our network regular?