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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?"
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?"
Yes, it's called a rack and a desk. You can find both of them available from retailers the world over. Seriously, this question is... trivial. It's all up to how you want to arrange things. As others have suggested, you could buy a seriously powerful multicore system with plenty of RAID storage that takes up under 4U for a few thousand dollars. Ok, so put it in the rack with the UPSs on the bottom (wait, do you need them all anymore?), a shelf with a monitor and KVM (because you only need it for emergencies, since you should connect in normally by remote) and we just used up under 12 square feet. That's a lot of room left for a desk and chair! Even if you don't want to buy a new server, then buy a few more shelves for your rack and stick them in it standing up.
I have five machines, one of which runs five other VMs, several UPSs an LTO-3 backup system, two ancient mini-fridge sized servers and a KVM all taking up less than 25 square feet. Half of that is the two ancient servers I'm about to get rid of. It's not that hard...