How Have You Equipped a Tiny Server Closet?

BenEnglishAtHome asks: "One of our remote offices will soon be gutted/rebuilt and our local IT staff managed to fumble the political ball. Our server closet is being reduced to 45 square feet and there will be no more unused desk space that can be occupied by visiting techs. Result? That 45 square feet must house 3 desktop-size servers; 3 UPSs; a fully-adjustable user workstation that includes separate adjustments for work surface height, keyboard height, and keyboard angle as well as a big ergo chair; an area suitable for workstation diagnostics; a good KVM switch; 2 monitors, keyboards, mice, and laptop docking stations that must be simultaneously available; and some amount of small item storage, while still having enough room for a door to swing into the roughly square room. The only bright side is that I can have all the A/C, power, and LAN drops I want. Has anyone managed to find and deploy a freestanding server rack/workstation/furniture system (probably something L-shaped) that can perform this many tasks in such a small space?"

Comments

Small areas = verticle space

[cyanics]

I have done it several times, although never to also include a diagnostic station, but i would strongly recommend that you think above the ground. In a 45' room, you would barely be able to fit one rack mount system. But if you are concerned primarily with desktop systems, then you can do 3 ties of shelving just large enough to hold a tower securely. Adjustable shelving might be a godsend.

Also, a small adjustable angle table (drafting table) might make it so that you can acomplish work when necessary, and also fold away when not in use. Use LCD monitors, flat mounted against the wall to conserve desktop space. Place the KVM on a shelf right next to the monitor, and run the cables (pre-wired) to the positions where you would be putting the servers. Run the cables through conduit to decrease clutter. Keep switches and networking gear closer to the ceiling, than to the floor. Ladders and step stools can be folded away when not needed to access those points. Keep all clutter put away, filing cabinets are a good double for extra space when needed.

As far as accessories, it really depends on what type of test equipment you need. I keep a gutted Athlon XP box on the floor around my server room, just for plugging in drives and accessories for testing. The KVM is probably the most important extra little bit though, get one that has atleast 5 attachments.

Keep everything neat and tidy, and you will be surprised at how much space a 45sqft room can provide.

ever been to Sam's Club?

[TheSHAD0W]

They have these really great baker's racks that can handle hundreds of pounds per shelf, and will allow airflow around the computer cases. The wireframe racks are great to hook pull-ties around too, makes the cabling neater. Casters on the feet mean you can roll 'em around to access the back. You can probably put everything on it, excepting for your monitor and keyboard; and with the space savings you ought to be able to fit a small desk in there.

Several other people have recommended rack setups, and for ultimate reliability and neatness I'd have to agree; but if your budget is small a backer's rack will do the job.

Enough room/electricity to expand

[plcurechax]

Real servers are rackable, in 19 inch wide, 42U (~72 inches I think ) high racks.

One UPS, hot swapable batteries are nice, but we fry as many APC brand controllers as we kill batteries. I like to have an independent AC line conditioner, on a serperate AC mains circuit (i.e. different 15A circuit breaker) so that those real servers with dual power supplies (hot swappable of course) go one to UPS, one to the line conditioner (for UPS failures). Have enough circuits (not just more plugs) to accomidate future growth. A Watts Up? or Kill-A-Watt meter are nice to measuring your electrical consumption.

Honestly with how swappable hardware RAID-5 disks, hot swappable power supplies, sensible power distribution, and practicing regular backup hygenie, downtime can be minimized to mere hours per year range or less with care and planning of the administrator(s).

I also love KVM over IP (I use an ) or ILO (Intergrated Lights Out management) for headless servers, and have a backup AC available for server rooms/closets.

For servers ideas look at HP Proliant DL380 or Dell PowerEdge 2850 series.

Re:Enough room/electricity to expand

[jebx]

15A? I'd get 3 dedicated 20A, which is code in most of the US for commercial buildings. I'd also see about getting isolated ground circiuts to help cut out some possible ground loop interference, but those are hard to come by. One if you need any cooling, and two for equipment redundancy.

Re:Suggestion:

[pla]

Start having lots of conversations in earshot of management about electrical fires.

And on a more serious note, start talking to management about the wisdom of putting a human in the server room.

We have a similarly sized server room at my workplace, a bit more horsepower though. And we can't actually work in there for any length of time due to OSHA regs - It stays a nice comfy 86-88db in there all the time. If (when, I should say) we need to replace a server, we would need to wear earplugs to legally stay in the room long enough.

Your boss might not care about pesky little problems like the Pauli Exclusion Principle*, but when it comes to OSHA, employers tend to go out of their way to do things the "right" way (and if not, you can guarantee they will the second time).



* Yes, I know - Laugh, don't take it literally.

Re:Shelve 'em

[Fallen Kell]

Yes, shelve them, but in a rack. Just about any system out there is either rack-mountible or capable of being placed on a shelf in a rack. Shelve them yes.

So lets see, 3 desktop sized servers and their UPSes should easily fit in a rack. Just make sure you get shelves that can handle the weight of the UPSes (unless the UPS is already rack-mountible, in which case, just get the rack kit for them). Get yourself a good slimline rack-mount KVM to place in there as well.

For item storage, get yourself a rolling cage bin. Something like this would work very well. You can get 2 or 3 of them and have that lined up right next to each other if you had wheels on them (at option), and then when you need to get to the other ones, just roll the ones in front of it out of the way.

I agree with others that say no deskspace in there. Maybe a temporary work area for doing a quick system setup/build, but not as a true "office cubicle" where you will have someone stationed in the room. Which brings up the actual need for an ergo table. There is no point in having an ergo table in a room like this asside from to waste space. You might want an ESD bench like this so that you can safely work on your computer equipment.

I would also look into getting a second rack for expansion room/capacity and make sure the KVM you purchase has room for at least 8-12 systems, that way you should really only need that one KVM to connect to every major system in the room. A second spare monitor/keyboard can be purchased with extention cords so you can connect that to a second system if need be (and as backup to the KVM in the room).

Racks, and rack-servers, and desks.

[billstewart]

19" racks are your friends. Most standard equipment fits in them, if you buy the right shelves, and having one makes it easier to convince your bosses to let you buy rack-mountable servers. Moore's Law means that they'll be a lot faster and cheaper than the three servers you have now, with much bigger disk drives. I'm assuming your UPSs are the el-cheapo type that support desktop PCs - put them on the bottom shelf of your rack because they're heavy and might leak, and make sure that whatever else you do, your DHCP and DNS servers are on a UPS - you may want to get a spare laptop to run those services separately from your other servers.

Since you don't have enough space, you'll need to deal with front&back access issues - if you're not in earthquake country, you probably should get a rack with wheels on the bottom (out here you'd need to bolt your racks to the floor or walls, so that means getting racks with no doors on them.) Metro shelves are also nice, but if you've got any significant amount of rack equipment (routers, etc.) real racks are a better choice.

Depending on how badly you lost the political infighting, I'll second the recommendation that you don't want to have to work in the server closet - they're usually noisy, hot, and often badly lit. Get a basic desk for the closet, so you've got some junk-storage drawers, and run VNC or equivalent on your servers so you can spend 98% of your administrative time at a regular desk where you can interact with your coworkers, and only hang out in the server room when you want to be uninterrupted or are playing your own political games.

I built a 200-square-foot lab about 10 years ago - Plan A was to spend $300 at the local furniture store for some Metro shelves and a couple hundred dollars more for a couple of good sturdy tables. Unfortunately, the Corporate Real Estate Gods decided that we had to go through a Corporate Furniture Consultant, and also get racks that bolted to the floor. I found it annoying that the Furniture Consultants called their product "Workstations", but since we ended up having to pay $900 per seat for the desks and got the PCs that went on them for $500/seat, the desks won the title of "workstation". And since we had to do lots of bureaucracy to get our racks purchased and installed, we got two of them, which was quite useful after a couple of years. Later we recycled a table from some former conference room, because we really did need a basic table.