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Ask Slashdot: Building A Server Rack Into a New Home?
jawtheshark writes "I'm building a house, and obviously I want a modest network built-in. Nothing fancy, two RJ-45 per room, four in the living room, and that's basically it. I already got myself a rack mountable Cisco Small Business switch and I have a self-built 4U server (low-power, won't make much heat) which can be rack mounted (505mm deep). Now, the construction company suggests a wall mounted rack (6U: 340mm x 600mm x 480mm — 6U definitely won't be enough, but a 12U model exists). It's not expensive, but I have never worked on a rack where the backside is unreachable. (For work, I get to work in a data center with huge racks that are accessible from both sides). Now obviously, I don't need a data center-grade rack, but these wall-mounted racks scream 'switch-only' racks to me. What are your experiences? Is it possible to put servers in racks like these, or should I find a 'both-side-accessible' rack instead?"
Why mess around with wall-mount brackets? You'll be cramped for depth when you want to throw in a real PoE switch, or some other gear you're not thinking about now. They also have swing-out racks that you can open the front and back from (as there are hinges on one of the back sides), but you'll pay quite a bit for these. I believe they are somewhere in the realm of $300-350 when we buy them for clients. Personally - I like lots of space, because you never know when you'll want to end up building a home theatre or adding another server, and centralizing all the gear where it should be - the server room. I have 42U 4-post black open frame rack (from a common manufacturer), that I picked up off Craigslist for $150 (normally $400 new)...and put it in a closet I converted into a server room. Put down a new floor, and raised the floor a couple inches where the server rack goes (no underfloor cooling unfortunately). Two dedicated 20A 110V circuits, two 1500VA batteries w/ mgmt cards, two 15A PDUs. CAT6 patch panel in the rack, also have a 2x2 wallboard with 66 block for CAT3 termination. No 6509 yet ;)
Get a swing-out rack - the catch is that most wall-mount racks aren't deep enough for servers of any kind.
Go with fiber optic. Nothing fancy. Just future proofing. That or conduits with pull strings.
Avoid wall mounts. Those are too limiting. Make space for a rack cabinet, even if a small one like 16U. Don't back it into a wall. Make sure you can move all around. And a small mini-split cooling system just for that room (it will accumulate heat if closed in).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Just the the wall mount rack that is hinged. The whole thing swings out for rear access.
Assuming that you aren't installing raised floors and a HVAC unit, there are plenty of racks, both full and half hight available. Or you can look at portable rack systems for shows. You can hide it in a closet (well ventilated) and pull it out to work on it.
We use wall mounted racks that swing out (hinged) so the back is accessible. They are available in just about any size you like. I highly recommend this if you do want to mount on a wall. Having no easy access to the back of a wall mounted rack is really a pain in the ***.
My rack could "swing out" from the wall to get at the backside, I had it mounted on the side wall of a closet.
Those wall mounted racks are generally for patch panels/switches/kvms/etc.. would definitely get something that sits on the floor if you want to put servers in there. You can probably get away with one (if you have the depth) .. but for the minor added cost, I'd go with a basic 4 post open floor mount rack.
Either way, there is absolutely no need to guess here. Any network rack or enclosure will advertise a load/weight limit. Add up the weight of your gear and subtract it from said advertised limit. If it's less than 0, get something sturdier!
(I'll also throw out there, some of the wall mounted units can swing out for access to the back.. worth it if you are using punchdown based patch panels.. probably not worth it otherwise)
One other caution.. make sure you've got actual studs where you plan on hanging this thing. Builders are getting cheap.. and your wallmount racks weight capacity is only as good as what your wall can handle!
I'd also be concerned with noise. I have to assume (though this is guess work) that mounting noisy equiptment directly to a wall is not going to end well.
At work we have 1U servers mounted on a two post rack. Every time I have to do any kind of work on the rack I basically have to do yoga to get at the back of the rack.
As nice as it is to get a full body workout every time something needs to be added to or removed from the rack, I would strongly suggest you avoid racks that can't be accessed from the back like the plague.
On the upside I have discovered unique ways to string together curse words while fumbling behind the rack.
Also plan for RG-6 for cable / satellite runs
your dealing with telecom racks which probably don't have back rails for the servers, look somewhere else and get a good rack, buy one and have the contractor install it that way there is no question.
Hoping the closet you converted has an exterior facing wall where you can install a dedicated window AC unit. You'd be surprised how much heat can come out of even one rackmount server unit..
Wheels.We've got racks in tight corners, and the solution was to put the rack on wheels, and a lot of slack on everything going to the rack.
Keep in mind that the diagonal of a square is longer than the side. Leave room to rotate without mashing hands.
If you use drawer slides in the rack, and use reasonable lengths for wiring, it could work. Another option would be to build a hinged frame to mount the rack on, so it can rotate out from the wall. Or, put it on/in a wall where you can open up the backside of the wall with a door that gives you access (I'm assuming the back of the rack isn't a solid panel). This would also make it easier to route cables down inside the wall.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Check out middle atlantic stuff. Consider either a swing out or roll out rack.
They _will_ have something that meets your needs.
A switch might be able to survive in an "airing cupboard" without particular cooling but even a "quiet" 4RU server is going to produce more heat than you want in a closed cupboard.
That said, unless you're going to die in this house, installing more than a wiring cupboard seems to be a massive waste of space that would make me want a discount on the future sale of the house.
Put a couple of the RJ45 points in the garage and the server in there, on a shelf.
make a closet, get two peices of 2"x2" angle aluminium, drill your holes, get self taping screws and firmly bolt it to your closet frame. Cantilever your equipment; just avoid heavy long 1u equipment. Option 2, go to a computer recycler, I can get a full sun rack for $150.
I built a rack mounted on a dolly, using Home Depot items for about $100. It is basically a frame of pipe (normally used for natural gas) all threaded and fit together with the normal connectors, with 4 flanges on the bottom to mount to the dolly. The dolly was the cheapest available at Home Depot since casters are normally expensive, just had to take it apart and shorten the length a little, to make everything a normal rack size. It stands about 4.5 ft high and can be moved easily, which is nice when you are just moving in-between apartments.
I have a 4U server that I built hanging vertically on the wall in my wiring closet at home using one of these: http://istarusa.com/claytek/products.php?model=WUT-40B . My case has lots of fans, so no problem moving the air vertically through it, and I left enough space below it to afford access to the connectors. They make other sizes of vertical mounts which may be more appropriate for your switch. It isn't a full rack, but it is a lot cheaper than a full rack, more practical than a full rack, and you can always upgrade later.
I have a EWR-12-22 from Middle Atlantic :)
12 units high
22 inches usable depth
150 lbs capacity
In addition to the front door, the whole unit swings out to get to the back, so it's very easy to work on.
Just make sure it's lag-bolted to something strong
I have seen wall-mount racks that side-mount to the wall, leaving the front and back of equipment accessible. That said, I'm not wild about any of the wall mount racks, at some point they will all be a pain.
If you have the floor space a small, 4 post cabinet is the way to go. You can often find used ones around for cheap. 4 post is preferred if you're going to have any quantity of systems in them. If the system count is low, and you won't do any 1RU or 2RU systems, a 2-post telco rack is super cheap and might take up less space. I put one in a basement a few years back. 4RU's mount fine with just front rails (screwed in, not on slides of course), and switches, routers, patch panels all work fine in a 2 post setup. Run a 20A dedicated run to it with a computer grade power strip down the side and you're set for life.
FWIW, having done a few houses, my recommendation is that each jack position get 5 cables, 3xCat5e and 2xRG6. These get terminated on a 6 position keystone, 2xRJ45 Network on top, 2x2-line RJ-11 (4C) in the middle, sharing the third Cat5 (blue/orange first jack, green/brown second), and then two RG6's get Coax jacks on the bottom.
The wire cost is low, additional pull cost is low. You pay a small amount to terminate all of that. However, you now have more than you'll ever need everywhere. That Sat system down the road, 2xCoax, check. Desktop and VoIP phone, 2 jacks, check. Home and business land lines, check. Buy keystone rack panels for your new rack, a row of network, next to the switch, row of telephone next to some splitters and/or DSL filters (if necessary), row of cable next to splitters and amps for whatever system type you have. Below that machines as necessary.
Far easier to pull up front than to be frustrated and without later.
If the drywall isn't up yet, take the opportunity now to run PVC conduit to the server rack closet from the room locations where you're planning on Ethernet drops, and possibly to other locations where you might want to run AV cable later on, such as likely mounting locations for a ceiling-mounted projector. It'll save you a ton of work later drilling through studs and firestops later on. Even if you don't run the cable now, you can run a fish tape through conduit and pull cable through it without having to cut through drywall to route it, especially in rooms that have no access to the top or bottom of the wall space.
I'll also agree with y00nix on the impossibility of having too much rack space. You never know what you might decide to install later, and more rackspace (and preinstalled conduit, see above) give you more expansion options. Trust me, 5-10 years down the road if not sooner, you're going to want to put more stuff in that closet. :D
All problems solved.
And wifi speeds suck compared to gigabit ethernet. And exactly how am I supposed to replicated my 47tb with 'small footprint' servers?
That's why datacenters are all WiFi right?
Have you considered building a Lack Rack? You could do a small stack. Then, you don't need to build anything into your house and it's relocatable.
At home I have a full 42U server rack, why? Because I bought it from a company that was shutting down for super cheap. If I was in your place, I'd but a half-ish height rolling rack. StarTech (among others) sells them for less than a thousand dollars.
I'd take whatever space you need and at least double it. Give yourself extra space for cable mgmt (because you can), assume you might want an extra server in there someday and don't forget the other gear you might add. Even if it's not rack mount - some UPS will probably be a very wise investment and take up at least a couple U of space (more if you put em on a shelf).
Those of us that are concerned about security prefer wired connections. Also, for high bandwidth consumption environments or environments where you want low latency the wired connections are going to serve you better.
We have a 1/2 size mobile rack that has 24U of space, on 4 rollers and it has soundproofing sides and front door with glass. Just make a closet big enough to roll it into and there you go.
I call bullshit on the wifi. The effectiveness of wifi is greatly limited by the structure of the house. Having wifi in an area like a room or 2 is fine. You will definitely want cabling throughout the house with wifi hotspots. A friend of mine at work has had nothing but headaches and frustration trying to get wifi-only in his new house. He is grateful that he went ahead and had it cabled too. Wifi is great for local connectivity but for kickass, reliable, speedier connections you still can't beat cable. I'd opt for all house fiber optic before all house wifi.
The WiFi that's been around for years and still can't reach the, now basic, 1Gbit/s speed of wired ethernet? No thanks. Today, I'd go for CAT6a wiring.
>
Let's face it - you're designing an office building. Ignore the construction company - make yourself a machine room with a raised floor, fluorescent lights, extra HVAC, the works. You may not need it all now, but you're going to need it eventually to keep all those RJ-45 jacks humming ...
You need to keep the wires and crap out of the way, you need to be able to get to all sides of the unit regardless of what it is. It needs to stay clean.
While you're building that also integrate the A/V system in and set it up the same way in the same clean room. Have AC, humidity control and filtering preferably HEPA filtering on the incoming AC since it should never have heat you'll want a unit just for that and a temperature control that will keep it at the right temp. It doesn't take much and even if it's a small room it's worth it in the long run. Insulate the room from the rest of the house no sense spending money cooling the house in the winter.
I've set them up before so they're easy to maintain and easy to rip the hell out and start over. The systems I've installed start and $25,000 as a base with four rooms covered.
Your TVs should be able to accept streaming video if not trash it and start over.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Second (or fiftieth) on the swing out/hinged wall-mount rack, if you want wall mounted, it's the best way to go. (I haven't used them in IT, but I have used sound equipment in a swing out rack and it's great when you need to add or change something quickly). I would avoid a 42U rack in a home environment unless you *know* that you will need all that space (also, many 42U racks will not fit through the average closet door). A good compromise may be a 25U rack, a simple four-post design is very affordable (especially when compared to the overall cost of building a new home) and should provide more than enough space. Utilizing sliding mounting rails and cable management arms should reduce the need for access to the rear of the rack enough that you can just push it against a wall and forget about it.
My house is all WiFi connected, but my desktops have extra NICs with gig connections to my server for backups that don't take forever. Wireless is the AOL of connection media- so easy, your grandmother can use it. But it's not good for serious transfers.
Do you also have one of these 'wives' I keep hearing about? How do I land myself one of those?
I'd go with fiber optic, at least along side the cats.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I bought a full height enclosed rack with cooling fans for $100 off Craigslist. It's on wheels so when I don't need to access it, it slides into a gap between the water heater and chest freezer. Just make sure all of the cables going in/out of it have enough slack for sliding it around a few feet.
They have racks that wall mount, floor mount, mount in custom woodwork and built into desks. They have fans to deal with heat and power strips too.
I use a two-post telco rack.
The network patch blocks panels mount right on it and so do all switches and routers.
For computers, I buy center-mount shelving. For the odd electronic device, a cantilevered shelf does the trick.
The two-post telco racks are fantastically inexpensive and are easy to fit in a furnace room or utility room. Since you're in a house, combining the network wiring with the servers economizes in space.
If you want to go fancy check out Smarthome.com.
Kriston
I had a house wired just like OP, with one Cat 6 wired RJ45 per room, every 15 feet or so in the big rooms. I thought it would be awesome! In the server closet (upstairs, in the middle of the house, in a closet) I had a wifi hotspot, a WRT54G. Because of its high, central location, I got great wireless access everywhere in the building. (actually, most of the city block)
Guess how often I used the wired plug ins? (Hint: It was very rare.)
I moved. My new house has no RJ45 connectors in the walls. I don't miss them much. When I need the speed, (EG: LAN parties) I have a 50' Cat6 cable I roll along the ground. Nobody minds much rolling it up at the end of the day.
You aren't running a data center. If you want to do that, get a job where you get to. Otherwise, spend $50 on a used wifi router on Craigslist or Ebay, mount it up high in the attic, and forget about it.
Spend the money and time you save getting a girlfriend. (or making the one you have happier)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
See above.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Depending on the room, you can buy two of the deeper wall mounts and cut a hole through the wall (if possible, obviously) and mount one on each side, so you get the benefits of the wall, but still some depth for servers and the like. Depends on your taste, but that's probably something I would do.
There are reasons why racks are set up the way they are, with space around them, the back accessible, and so on. Follow that example. And don't ask the construction company how to essentially build a small data center...they don't know. Don't wall-mount, but do anchor whatever rack you install to the floor. Have some space around it, and be able to vaccuum out dust (since you'll have a bigger problem with that than most data centers). Also, if you put it in the basement, make sure you have all power a decent distance up off the floor. I don't know your environment or climate, but minor flooding does happen in basements, and what would normally just be a bit of a mess can become a disaster if you have a PDU low enough to get wet. I don't agree at all with the idea of fiber for everything...whatever that guy is smoking, I'm sure I won't keep my job if I have any myself. (Yeah, for that guy...how many household electronics come with fiber interfaces? Or, for that matter, wifi access points with fiber connections?)
Look at any holy trinity of a server room, and scale to your liking. Patch panel, networking gear, server space. A half-height rack should do you just fine, and still be quality enough that the whole thing will look nice and sanitary. Velcro strips for cable management will be your friend as well, to keep it all super-sano, especially the cable bundles coming out of the rack. Oh, and if you're really interested in making some things easier to trace, there are now ethernet cables that light up at both ends, so that you hit a button on one end and can see the other end light up. The light stays on for about 30 seconds, and it's a godsend if you have a significant cabling area.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I went with the rolling half rack. Easy peasy, $100 at the surplus. Just make sure you secure it in case of earthquake.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
WiFi is adequate if you're forever alone or you're the only one using the spectrum. A home with 2 adults, 2 kids, and a bunch of personal devices that stream media from a central server, dedicated ethernet is the way to go.
I may have misunderstood the scale of what you are trying to do, but... It seems to me you're trying to turn a domestic environment into a semi-industrial/work one. A server rack will consume a lot of power, generate a lot of heat, create a lot of noise, the the server will depreciate in value rapidly and you'll probably need to install fire barriers and get a special insurance policy if you want cover. Don't get married before you start this project, at least that way you'll save the cost of the divorce.
I used to have two full sized racks in my basement. I had smoked glass doors on the front side into my home office, and a storage room behind them so that I could get to the backs of them.
I also built a small data-centre with 12 full sized racks, and for it I had a 12RU box wall mounted in addition to the floor models which I used for the main routers and telephony. It was on hinges and swung away from the wall so that I could get at the back. I don't recall the price, but I know it wasn't cheap. Also I had trouble with the cable management between the equipment mounted in it, and the fibre and other feeds coming into it.
Either way I think you're correct that having access to the back is pretty much a requirement for it to be very usable.
BTW, I got rid of all my racks in the end. I gave away my hosting business and consolidated my home stuff into a couple of towers that sit on a desk. I now have a nice wood lathe where the old racks used to sit. I mounted my home routers and switches into the joists with wood screws. Maybe you don't need a rack at all?
Just my opinion, but speaking from experience, you will want front and back access. EASY front and back access. I've tried the slide-out rails, but frankly, I'd rather just walk around back and eyeball the connections myself. It's surprisingly difficult to change something when you're working at an angle.
We built all of our racks into a wall, but we cheated: it's a wall between rooms. (The "Technical Information Center" and the "Technical Operations Center" -- TIC and TOC.) :) We just walk around back and tinker to our heart's content, while the people who walk by the Engineering area in our studios get to see pretty blinky lights and other stuff through the glass. You might consider mounting your server into the wall with its butt in a closet. That way, you not only hide the wires, you simply walk into the closet for good access.
You will tell yourself, "I hardly ever change anything." You'll try to convince yourself that a little side access should be a plenty. But again, speaking from experience, you'll regret.
Oh ... and don't forget that server needs to breathe. If it's farting out several cubic feet of air per minute into that closet or wall-mounted rack, you'd better plan on a fan to pull that hot air out of there. (Again, speaking from experience.)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Just get a metal bracket and hang the server vertically (or invert it so that the cold to hot flow is from bottom to top. That takes up a LOT less room. But if you want a full sized one, I have a full height full cage rack in my garage you are welcome to have for free. But you pay shipping. :-)
Exactly why do I need reduntant power, redundant networking and locked cages for a home network? All I need is tons of storage and very fast interconnects. Every PC in my house does backups to the server. The same server also serves media to all the media devices in the house. There is a middle ground between grandma checking her email and a professional web host. Some people's requirements may be different than yours. Deal with it.
So... Redundant everything isn't enough, but you call him out for extravagances like Ethernet?
What a tool.
DATABASE WOW WOW
If you can find the room, consider those recommendations you've seen for a rolling rack. At my last job, I had in my office a little rolling rack in which I used to keep a 4U server, 4U UPS, and several switches. I often kept it closed and locked (it had auxiliary fans and vents), but you may not have that need. It was the most versatile setup I had. It was small enough to put into a corner out of the way, but gave me full access to the equipment when needed. If it hadn't been painted an awful orangish-pinkish color that absolutely sent your eyes into convulsions, it could have been mistaken for a cubist table (with some mysterious fan noise).
I don't know if building codes would allow it, but I've often thought of creating a actively-ventilated rack-garage in a kitchen peninsula (or similar) into which one could roll a short rack and then roll down a retractible door. Of course the potential for liquid spill incursion would have to be taken into consideration.
In any case, I cannot imagine the frustration of using a wall rack for a server. Swing-away would seem to make it better, but all the swing-away racks I've ever used or seen (cheap or expensive) develop hinge-sag and can get difficult to swing closed.
And then you want two RJ45 per room, four in the living room, and a -4- unit server at home. You, my dear nerd, is the computer world's equivalent of a muscle car redneck.
I worked at a site with wall mounted racks, but it was all Token Ring and the MAU's did not have any ports on the back and were not powered. I still didn't like them and when I was given the assignment of converting the entire site to Ethernet the wall mounted racks were a pain the butt until I could replace them. For what you are wanting to do I would absolutely want access to both the front and back side of the equipment -- without a wall in the way.
As you surmised, wall mount racks are switch only. I went through the same intellectual process and saw no solution but to buy a floor standing rack. It sits in my garage and is accessible from both sides. Mine has a large enough footprint to be stable, but if you get one of those skinny spidery racks, you should sink some bolts into the floor to make sure you don't have a sudden gravity-induced catastrophic failure.
If your equipment has redundant supplies, you should plug them in separate circuits. I did this after a GFI blew and took out my servers. I wasn't even aware that the GFI in the master bath was on the same circuit as the plug in the garage.
If you're interested in battery backup, instead of a dedicated UPS, consider a true sinewave inverter (available on amazon) and a couple of marine batteries (available almost anywhere) fed by a heavy duty battery charger. Why? Because it's easier to switch to solar later if you're so inclined.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hinged racks are really expensive ... just buy a conventional wall-mounted rack and mount it on regular hinges. It's nice to carve 10cm or so into the wall so that cables fit nicely when you close it. Front and back access without using much room. Another thing I've done when not much room is available is build a trap door in the wall where the wall-rack will be mounted. When you need to access the backside, you just go to the other room and pull out the trap door. If none of this is feasible, just mount the servers in rails. Without a hack like this, wall-mounted racks are just for switches and other devices with front connectors.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
If all you need is space for a network switch and a single server, why not put the server in a desktop case, and put both the rack and the switch on a shelf. Or just keep it in the rackmount case and put it on the shelf.
Or, if you're looking for something to impress your friends when they see your server room, put in whatever it is that impresses your friends. With lots of blue LEDs.
Commonly used for decades, you get some quality rack slides that let you pull things out far enough to get to the back sides of them. Remember, the standard 19" rack has been around a long time, and this situation also - consider a Navy boat or an AWACs plane with stuff mounted to the walls - same problem, and they need quick access. I never knew what those things cost new, because for a long time they were almost give-away surplus. Probably an almost lost tech now, but they really made some quality stuff back then, self-lubed surfaces, some would let you rotate the gear after sliding it out, all kinds of good stuff. They did make things protrude from the front about 1/4", because the rack slide mounts to the rack, then the gear mounts to that - so you have one extra metal/screw thickness involved.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Better not forget your smartnet contract. HAHAHAHa
If you aren't then all your geek credentials will be revoked.
Some people have recommended a hinged rack that swings out. I would suggest a rack on wheels. IMO using a rack is not crucial. The only crucial thing is having easy access to all the connections and all the equipment.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Also brings back memories. I built a house years ago and ran wires within the walls--for a Lantsastic network! This was before widespread ethernet, of course. Then WiFi showed up. I laugh at my own lack of foresight! I fooled myself.
I applaud your efforts. Just plan for MORE rack space and keep your versatility. Everything will be connected. Sounds like fun. Wish I could do it again.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Use a wall mounted rack for the switch, patch panels, etc. for all the CAT6 runs to various rooms. You'll only need front access for this stuff.
Get a half rack for the servers. Put it on wheels so you can pull it out of the closet, turn it around to access the back, etc. There will only be a couple of Ethernet drops from the switch to the moveable cabinet, so you won't pull loose all the house network wiring every time you move it.
Have gnu, will travel.
A couple suggestions:
1) Run more wire. Nobody ever said "Damn, I ran too many cables while the walls were open". It's really cheap to do now. You also may want to run some quad-shielded coax for future cable or satellite hook-ups. You might not want 'em now, but the cable's really cheap.
2) If you have an attic and a basement, run a good-sized conduit between the attic and the basement. Like 2" or larger. Leave it empty except for a pull cord. This will make it very easy to pull any future wires between the floors, and once again it's absurdly cheap to do while the walls are open.
If I could afford one of these I would get one in a heartbeat:
http://xrackpro.com/
noise reducing with air filter options
I have a friend whos house has two rather nice entertainment systems in his basement. They are both managed from the same central location where a shelving unit, which would be similar to a rack mount is accessible from a door that swings out and faces the main area. Then in order to get behind the shelves easier they put a closest on the back side so that theres more storage space and the rear of the shelves are accessible.
Find a surplus sale and buy a used 42U rack.
Home run all the Cat 6 into the rack (you are having all the phones wired with Cat 6 right?) and add a patch pannel
Also have all the house cable home run into the rack plus a couple runs of fiber from the telco service entrance just to be future proof.
Feed the rack a dedicated 220v circuit with an in rack PDU.
If possible have a 2-3" conduit run from the entertainment center to the rack for media PC use so you can run HDMI or whatever comes next without opening up walls.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Agree with others that have suggested "go big or go home". If you're the type of person that thinks about installing a server rack in your house, a 6U or 12U rack probably isn't going to be big enough for long enough. Plus, as you've noted, the smaller racks are really designed for network equipment, not servers. If you're going to put a server in there, you may as well go for at least a half rack. And I'd really recommend a four post setup with sliding rails for whatever servers you end up putting in there - it just makes things so much easier. You'll inevitably end up needing to upgrade RAM or something, and it's a huge PITA if you have to pull the whole server out of the rack. Plus, four post racks are readily available second hand on craigslist.
As to your comment about two cat5 jacks per room and four in the living room - as someone who did exactly that four years ago when I build my house I can tell you that you're boxing yourself in. If you're going to have a home office, you probably want to put at least four jacks in there. For your living room, just think about all the stuff you may someday have that will want cat5. I have an Apple TV, Samsung TV, Xbox, Bluray, and a PC. I ended up putting a 5 port switch in my entertainment center, and it may well be more cost effective to only run one network jack to a small switch at locations where you need higher port density. Most home stuff doesn't have really high throughput requirements, so losing the single highspeed backplane of a centralized switch isn't a huge issue. The only issue here would be (as in my case) if you need PoE on some of those ports.
Here are a few other things I'd do differently if I was building again and had a budget for this sort of thing:
1) Run a min 20A (30A is even better) dedicated circuit with a twist lock connector to the rack's location. If you want to get a rackmount UPS in the 2000-3000VA range, it will probably require this.
2) Install sound deadening around the rack - network equipment is typically pretty noisy
3) Plan for cooling - if you can run an A/C duct to the rack's location that's good, but plan for how you're going to keep stuff cool when the rest of the house has reached your target temperature and the central A/C turns off for 30 minutes. You may want to look at one of the smaller portable A/C units that you can duct either into the crawlspace (check local codes about this, you may run into problems with mold if you duct moist air up there), or outside.
4) Run CONDUIT - this is probably the biggest tip I can give you. If you're able to install wall boxes and such before drywall goes up, spend $100 on a roll of blue flex conduit and run that from your wall boxes up into the attic/crawlspace. Make sure to stub the conduit up high enough so that any blown-in insulation doesn't cover the top of it. You'll be so glad you did this in a few years when you want to upgrade or add more wiring.
5) Cable management - don't overlook it. Patch panels and wire management to and at the rack make life so much nicer. You can get by without it but if you do a really nice job you'll find yourself wanting to show it off to your friends to impress them (unfortunately, it usually just draws a blank stare). 6) K.I.S.S. - since I'm a network engineer, I built my home network with a cisco router, AP and switch, created VLANs and public/private WiFi networks, then realized that most consumer level tech isn't designed to be compatible with that in the least. Take Apple TV for instance - it relies on network broadcasts. If you have an iPad or iPhone with airplay and want to send a stream to your Apple TV, the two devices have to be on the same network. There's no way to manually enter device IP addresses to get two devices on separate subnets to talk to each other. Naturally, if your PCs are on a private network with the Apple TV, that's well and good, but what if a friend comes over and connects to your public WiFi and you want him to be able to use airplay from his iPhone? I've had similar problems with Slingbox, etc. That kind of stuff just isn't designed to work on a network any more complicated than what you get with your standard Linksys router.
Hopefully some of this is helpful to you.
I am some guy who has done stuff like this, including oversaw the construction of a custom condo where I directed certain changes be made to accommodate data networking and a little server room. For my day job, I sysadmin and have directed the construction of a modern mid-size data center (30 racks) and multiple office environments. I oversee lots of structured cabling installations.
I have beat my head against the wall many times, over stupid stuff. So, let me give you some advice.
For example, the fact that you want a 4U rackmount anything in your home is just crazy. Knock it off. You really don't want anything rackmount in your home, though that is the only form factor you are going to find larger switches in.
No professional sysadmin or programmer would put a rackmount server in his home because he knows it is stupid. There is a reason you put computer guts into that form factor and those same reasons do not apply in your home. Get over it.
You are using the logic of "Penguins are Black and White. Some Old TV Shows are Black and White. Therefore, Some Penguins are Old TV Shows" . Just because professionals use rack servers in data centers doesn't mean you are a professional when you put one in your home.
You almost certainly do not want a rackmount chassis for your server. Instead, use a desktop chassis which meets your needs (or whatever is cheapest). The only time you might use a rackmount chassis would be for mounting it directly onto a wall using the ears, but even then, I would never use a 4U height chassis.
Same thing goes for the patch panels. You don't need a rack at all. Ortronics makes a nice little 12-port wall-mounter patch panel which is perfect for home use. I have exactly 24 cat5e runs in my home, so two of them were perfect. FYI Ortronics also makes pretty good jacks and plates too -- get a catalog and call your local Anixter or Graybar for an order.
In my particular case, I have a single do-it-all server with five internal SATA disk drives for primary storage, an old SCSI card which attaches to an external DLT tape drive for backups, and I have an external 5-disk SATA enclosure which is inside of a fire-proof enclosure in case the place burns down. I have a bunch of old APC UPS units in the home which all have network cards in them. I use wireless only for my laptop and phone, where every room has at least two network jacks and as many as eight.
The biggest issues in this server closet are air flow for heat removal, and noise isolation. I live in the southwest where it gets really hot in the summer and the closet where I keep my gear is next to the garage, where it gets warm. I had to cut a vent into the door near the bottom so fresh/cool air could enter the closet, and I have a small fan which blows the old/hot air into the garage. The little 'server closet' has that do-it-all server with the ten disk drives, a cable modem, a 24-port switch, an APC UPS, an APC per-port controlled PDU, and sometimes I keep a second little cheapy server in there for experiments. So I need a little bit of air flow to keep it at a reasonable temperature in there.
However, all of these fans and junk make noise, which is bad. My old switch was the worst offender and I had to ditch it for a different switch. I also found that wall-mounting the switch caused vibrations to go through the wall, so I had to solve that problem by putting it on a small shelf with a layer of foam underneath.
Cat5e cable is probably fine for now. I like Berk-Tek brand riser/plenum cable as an intermediate of price and quality. If you really want to be able to do 10GBASE-T some day, you will have to go with Cat6a, which is crazy expensive. FYI, the current 10GBASE-T spec calls for spans of something like 25 meters with Cat5e, so you might be able to do 10GBASE-T over the Cat5e anyway.
Get over it, stop rack mounting things in your house, and get someone who knows structured cabling in there to help you pick some good cable, jacks, and the patch panels. I already told you about Ortronics and Berk-Tek. A clueful person could go from there.
At a friends house, they have all their AV equipment in cupboards embedded in the wall. If you need to reach the back of something, you walk around into the corridor and open the cupboard. The same thing could easily work with a rack assuming you allow for ventilation.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
That's why datacenters are all WiFi right?
You are comparing the connection density and count of a data center to a HOME?
You can call it what you want - home datacenter etc., but if WiFi is not a solution for all but one room with most of your gear, you're probably violating some zoning ordinances.
The problem is that his wife asks: "Is that a toothpick in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
I'm building a house, and obviously I want a modest network built-in.
No, it's not obvious. This is Slashdot. If anything, it's obvious that you want a completely immodest network for completely immodest uses.
Let's start by assuming you want to steam uncompressed 36-bit 400 FPS 8K 3D video from multiple angles in every room. You want it streaming in too, to giant displays covering every surface. Don't forget to display video on the ceiling, floor, doors, toilet tank, toilet lid, exterior roof, and driveway.
Each room will thus require about 15 Tb/s symmetric. You can get this by using wavelength-division multiplexing on your fiber with a few dozen colors of light. Alternately, a fat bundle of 100 Gb/s Ethernet should do the job. It'll be as thick as your arm. Maybe you'll want to do that for each room, saving the wavelength-division multiplexing for the links to your peering points.
I've handled this exact same issue. I work for a property management company and have wall-mounted half-racks with big, 4U Bosch DVR's at quite a few facilities. (These are basically rack-mounted mid-tower PCs with a steel front panel and a mobo that accepts the camera feeds.) We use a garden variety wall cab which consists of a huge, huge wall bracket with the cabinet attached on a hinge for rear access.
Weight concerns? These DVRs weigh a TON; about the same as a 4U server stacked with hard drives. It's a bit of a snug fit in the back, but they've been mounted and running for years.
That being said, you most definitely can mount servers in a wallmount cab, depending on their form factor. Specifically, you're pretty much limited to mid tower servers that can be converted to rackmount. You most definitely cannot mount most servers advertised as 'rackmount' due their tendency to have a lot of depth. (Unless you're talking about SuperMicro or something.) An HP DL180, for example, will need around 6-10 inches more depth than any wall-mounted cab can provide.
So there you go.
are you going to be plugging stuff into the back of these computers? you wont be as flexible in 25 years
2x4's properly spaced work great. Use 2 inch wood screws and your set. Heavy screws, not drywall screws. This is how all my studio gear is mounted, including a 4U computer, and quite a few heavy amps.
A nice soundproofed rack will make all the difference. Bonus if you can also soundproof the room it goes into.
and regretted it. Go for the full rack day one for full access. Think very hard about cooling and power. You may very well start small, but it will grow, you will run out of electricity, and it will get hot. I asked my construction company for a dedicated A/C unit, and foolishly let them talk me out of it. Just redid the whole thing with a 3KV rack-mounted UPS, separate A/C unit, and a dedicated 30A circuit. However you go, spend a few bucks on a remote temperature sensor that alerts you when it hits an warning state. My entire setup came close to frying when the house A/C controller kept calling for heat and the server room hit 90 degrees. Construction companies have no idea. You know more than they do, because you are asking the questions and they are not. Don't trust the A/C companies either. Their goal is to sell you stuff they can do quickly, not to listen to what you tell them! Write down what you want, ask them to document their assumptions, show you their math, and give you a written guarantee it will work to your specifications. Good luck. This was the funnest part of the house build by far - at least the second time around!
And wifi speeds suck compared to gigabit ethernet. And exactly how am I supposed to replicated my 47tb with 'small footprint' servers?
So... you can pick up and move your equipment when you need to do bulk transfers, or run a temporary cable between them. You need to answer this question, how often do you need a sustained 1gb vs. 300mb between separate rooms in your house?
I can understand some hobbies might utilize fast transfer speeds frequently, but if it needs to be between different rooms in a house, you are just being ridiculous, or you are an _extreme_ outlier.
Businesses of all sizes often do initial replication locally then ship storage offsite if it saves them from clogging a WAN link for weeks on end. Their cost-benefit analysis does't stop with "but it's faster"
Only because this is a new home, _if_ the cost is trivial, then my response is fuck it, why not. All you disparaging WiFi in the home are delusional. There is no sound reason for it not to be part of the picture. Tethering everything to one wall in a room "because it is faster" is silly.
Wifi has positively abysmal transfer speeds compared to a modern wired LAN..
It's not that a big deal if you are only moving data between your computer and the Internet, but it can spell no end of difference when transferring large quantities of data from one system to another on one's own LAN.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Fuggit, use concrete blocks and some 2 by 4s. "custom".
Need Mercedes parts ?
http://www.kellsystems.co.uk/18u_server_cabinet.asp
We put a couple of the 38U versions of these in an office and they work great. The only knock we have is that the veneer is a bit fragile.
2nded. Had massive stuttering with 802.11n when > 1 client tried to stream a BD rip...
Switched to plain old 100Mbit ethernet with GigE uplink to the media library and... works.
The data-center style hardware is more reliable and less of a long term expense.
First off, 2 rj45 per room and 4 in the living room seems to me as excessive. Yes, a hard line is better then wifi, but that's a lot of copper to put in "just in case" when small hubs are cheap.
Second, and more importantly, you don't want a rack. Racks and rack mount gear are sexy but only make sense if space is really tight. Like in a colo rack or if you have 1000 servers. Plain old tower cases on a shelf is more then adequate and costs a lot less.
In my basement I had two closets that were back to back (well, side to side) so I knocked the wall down between them. Now they form a corridor for my gear. I built some deep cantelevered shelves to put the computers on. All of them are in mid or full tower cases, with the back-end towards the main door, front end towards the secondary door. Getting at the back is IMHO more important then the front.
I also sound proofed the space and the main door. The shelving is on hard rubber mats (cow row) to avoid vibration transmission.
For cooling and ventilation, I have the secondary door open with 2 120mm fans in a small box I build. I stretched some old stockings over the intake for filters. The scondary door leads into my storage space which never gets above 20C ever.
Now I have a cheap wireless router and a netbook.
Needs change.
:wq
Seconded on the 42U rack. I have one and it is nice - it is about half empty currently, but the extra height does not take up useful space (I wouldn't put anything on top of a smaller rack anyway) and can be useful in the future. After all, 10 years ago I thought I would have only 1 PC ever so I did not reserve space to others. Result - huge mess.
Both of my UPSs are not rack mountable so I placed them beside the rack the smaller one (700VA) on top of the bigger one (2200VA).
I have run Cat5E similar to what you describe (two jacks per room, none in Dining room (duh!) all run to one patch panel in the basement), and I scored a 42U surplus rack off eBay, andrackmount shelves, rails for servers aren't THAT expensive...
Get the patch panel in the wall, hang a rackmount switch next to it, and then mount servers, KVM, UPS, etc.
If you prefer, Metro shelving (the metal shelving common in kitchens,etc) is OK (IMHO), but I think you'll want to avoid stacking machines on top of other machines...
Of course, if you only have one machine Metro shelving may be best - put the system, UPS, etc on the top shelf, the rest are for storage.
Ken
I took one those shipping racks from a SAN shipment, can be moved if needed and painted to match room.
Pick up and move? Temporary cables? Are you seriously trolling or what? I do multi gig transfers daily and mostly automatically. Streaming 1080p to multiple clients would completely saturate wifi and isn't feasible at all.
Yes there is wifi in my environment but the devices that don't move are hard wired.
My house is all WiFi connected, but my desktops have extra NICs with gig connections to my server for backups that don't take forever. Wireless is the AOL of connection media- so easy, your grandmother can use it. But it's not good for serious transfers.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything. And that was the initial copy... subsequent daily updates from my mail server (in colocation) to my home fileserver complete in under 10s. Store your user files on a network hard drive, and make sure the fileserver has RAID, and you should be fairly safe. If you *really* want to have a backup in a separate system, then connect a second fileserver on a Gig-E switch right next to the main fileserver, and set up rsync with a cronjob. It still won't come close to saturating the connection for any protracted amount of time, except possibly during the initial sync.
54-mbit wireless is fast enough to play media from a central filesever on one or two computers live. More than that it does get a little iffy, but that's why you've got 150- and 300-mbit wireless... my laptop is connected using dual band 300mbit wireless, and never has any problems copying to or from the fileserver.
That's not to say that I don't have NIC's installed. But it is to say that, for now at least, there's no Cat5e going to every room. When I build a new house in a couple of years, there will probably be Cat5e to every room to facilitate an IPTV install, but I expect that I will still mostly use wireless to connect computers, and only plug in to the GigE to install an extra AP if needed, or to connect a desktop computer that doesn't have a wireless adapter. In other words, it'll replace the role that's currently being served adequately by powerline networking adapters.
My colo consists of 15 cable modems and a mess of hardware on the floor.
Hahaha Wow. No. Thats a bad kitty. Who let you in here? For any serious data transfers in the home, wifi is a bad idea. Even Ethernet over power lines is bad (802.11n is more cost-to-performance effective). It is really worth the effort to pull the line. It would take me 8 hours to ghost my laptop with about 60 gigs vs about 2 over gigabit LAN. I don't always keep the laptop on the wire, only if i have a large transfer and it is too big for portable storage. If you have television coax, you should be able to pull the Cat-5 or whatever twisted pairs through the same hole in the wall cap from the attic. I did this and replaced the wall plates with a coax and cat-5 combo. Was an easy weekend project done in the winter. Fishtape and electrical tape helps.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
You're telling me. Between three adults we have two wifi-capable cell phones, a kindle, iPod touch, three desktops, two laptops, a net book, a synology nas, a wireless printer, and an Internet enabled flatscreen tv. If I could find the time to run cat5 I would, the poor wifi router is getting a workout.
They use standard rack sized equipment as most amplifiers are rackable, along with many of the EQ's and other sound equipment (including cd players). They have some very basic (but decent looking) rack systems on casters ready to go up to 19U, and some slightly smaller setups as well.
I pulled all my cat5 myself in an existing structure into my garage and tied it all into a little switch on a small shelf. The cable modem and wireless router is by the tv and attached to said router. In my mancave is a repurposed desktop tower with WHS2011. I thought about doing the whole rack mount thing but I really had more flexibility with the tower setup (drive bays, upgrade room, and such) and there are many many home server storage solutions on the Internet. I put mine in a glass cabinet on an old entertainment center and installed a couple of USB powered fans on the back. If I need to do anything local on the server, the tv in there has a VGA input. Works beautifully. In fact, considering the space you need for a rack, I don't think I'd have it any other way.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Built mine out of wood. Cheap, neat, bespoke, quick and can change it anytime you want. One word of warning... FANS ARE NOISY, don't use anything with fans, especially higer powered stuff such as PoE.
Do a google search for "Vertical Wall Mount Rack". I've used a few of these before and they are very sturdy. A few of them I saw were in the 5-6U size, which would meet your needs.
Hi,
Why mess with custom framing, etc., at all? If you have the means, just get a datacenter-class enclosure, and put it in the basement: http://www.werackyourworld.com/, and be done with it.
All of this guff about building this, that or the other thing? Screw that - it just adds to construction costs, and limits flexibility. A standard enclosure will suit all of your needs now, and in the future, won't ever require reconstruction, and you'll be guaranteed of future compatibility, since it's made to industry specs.
In addition, it will be accessible from all sides, assuming you place it so. And, if you have to, you can move it.
Every time I read about this issue on Slashdot, some idiot wants to proclaim how his "closet" solution is best. You don't want it in a closet, unless you want to have to deal with cooling. In a home, a basement is ideal to help cooling, and noise, and since you're building your home, you can do this, with appropriate planning.
Get an enclosure, put it it in your basement, with sufficient clearance all around, put in an overhead cable tray if you want to make it all pretty, and be done with it.
Regards,
dj
So I've got 75 RJ-45 drops in my house, all going to a 12U wall mount rack. It works just fine. No, I don't have an HP DL360 hanging in it, just a sonicwall firewall, a couple of POE switches, and a QNAP storage server, along with a few other random network devices. It's a house, not a datacenter. You're not going to need back access for the most part, and you probably won't have anything deeper than 18" stored in it.
Five years, no complaints.
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything.
Are you serious or just being funny? Text compresses well. Video does not. 5GB is nothing. I have more than 10 TB of video from favorite shows/movies, almost another TB in photos, and about 300 GB of ripped music.
Wifi fucking blows ass for anything that isn't basic web browsing. If I can hard-line, I will hard-line.
Wifi is adequate for the average home that usually has one or two computers, a game console, and maybe a couple phones, but when you're paying for top-tier bandwidth plans from your ISP and have a ton of connected devices it's retarded to piss half of the capability away because you couldn't be arsed to run a fucking cable and get the whole nut at all times. If your electronics aren't moving anywhere regularly, why the fuck would you not just hard-line? The cost of the cable is trivial and installation is a joke.
PS - TROLOLOLOLO...
One good option is the open-frame floor mount racks, which go up 30-40-ish U. You have to move all your rack ears to the middle of your devices for balance, or you'd have to get a 2nd to have rear mount points. Put this about 2 feet away (at least) from all walls and you have space to walk around it.
I recently picked up a half height, enclosed rack with wheels for my home network at a local computer recycler for a hundred bucks. I can push it into a corner while it's in use and if I need to work on it, I can just wheel it out, remove the sides and have complete access. Highly recommended.
If you're only setting up a few systems with modest weight and heat production, in an out of the way corner, consider a half-hight rolling rack if you can find one from a company going out of business, or a local auction house. When my clients have been short of cash for glamorous data centers, I'm helped them find local dealers or even used temporary shelving from a local hardware store, such as Home Depot, for short term and very inexpensive shelving.
Just be careful not to overload such shelving, and be careful to protect your floors. If you start loading it with equipment, it be heavier than a refrigerator on flooring that isn't designed for that kind of load and damage the floors.
Get a vertical 'wall hanger' rack. Putting it horizontal is just silly.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Simple solution: get a modest size rack and snuggle it *sideways* to the wall. It's not quite as obtrusive that way because it doesn't go as far into the room, and then you get access to both the front and the back. In my basement I have a rack sideways on the wall and a desk in the corner behind it. That corner also happens to be where cables from the rest of the house come in, and the service cables arrive there as well (fiber to the home ftw!). Instant geek cave.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I have a half-height enclosed server rack for my servers. It's a 22u rack that I found on eBay dirt cheap. There's plenty of room for my multiple servers, SAN and APC 3000VA UPS, 24-port gb switch (not layer 3....yet), 4060 SonicWall firewall, and PDU.
Stuff like this can be done on the cheap. Yeah - I know that I don't "need" it. But I do lots of experimenting at home since I don't get training assistance from my employer. Soon I'll be adding a 6509 for free (except the power will kill me).
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The majority of Racks i work with on the wall actually swing open so you can access the rear of the equipment.
Granted, the majority of racks i work with are actually free-standing not wall-mounted
You need to put a server in a well-ventilated area. Putting it in a closed closet will just lead to grief.
Grief means: slowly rising temperatures, premature component failures (hard disks), then data loss.
Well since we're all moving to tablet and they don't need RJ45s, why put them in? And as we're moving to flash over hard disks, and servers the size of cable plugs, all of this sort of becomes silly.
My next computer will be a Tegra 3 quad core Android tablet, resolution 1920x1200 (Acer A700 I have it on order), and my next home server will be some micro box that I'll put next to the socket the broadband comes in on.
That's not FUTURE proofing, that's what I'm doing NOW. So tomorrow I expect things to only get smaller and better.
What a ridiculous self-serving question... "Hey, I got money,
I wanna blow it by lookin like a big deal. Can you help me
achieve my asshattery?"
Multi- terabytes of storage on two computers, mine and
my roommates. Easily accessible on any of 3 HTPCs and
3 laptops througout the house. ONE cheap ass router from
the provider, with 4 ports and wifi. Not one damn rackable
item anywhere. I did IT for nearly two decades and the last
fucking thing I want to see in my home, my sanctuary... is
something that looks like my old work.
Oh, I get it... closet... riiiight. Closed off, where you don't see
it. The one where you have to put in its own cooling system
and monitoring system.
And no, I'm not spilling forth jelly bile... I have a "perfect closet"
to house every bit of equipment in. But why? Then I have to cut
two holes in there and pipe in cooling, which isn't easy or cheap
here. (The cooling part) And then a monitoring setup to make sure
it stays cool. Where a regular PC in a regular room will suffer
the indignities of too much heat... a closet that loses its cooling
will destroy EVERYTHING. Including things that might not have
died.
So, I have this thing called an OFFICE in my home, where my
work equipment resides. Install an OFFICE in your home before
you install an "I am self-important rack closet". If you have an
office, great... you still don't need a rack closet just to break out
a dozen ports. In fact, the talent there would be to put the switch
behind a painting or something... like you do a wall safe. THAT,
would be 'modern'. Use the "closet space" for something useful.
A home office is always more impressive than a hole you stuff
all your electronics in. I stopped being impressed by rackables
in a house somewhere around the first dot com bubble.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Coming at this from an AV installation background, I'd use something like these:
http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/roll/axsm.htm
http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/roll/srs.htm
Well you obviously have a lot of extra advice that you didn't ask for that may be useful to you but going back to your question... Take a look at the dimensions you have given as everyone else seems to have missed this, the server you have won't fit in the rack you have been offered. The 600 measurement is the 19" rack width the 480 depth is where you want to squeeze a 505 deep server - you will need to cut a hole in the wall to mount that server.
I don't know why all the supposed Slashdot server experts have to muck with their servers so much. I just throw a cheap P4 in a closet and forget about it. If you need to get frequent, fast access to your server at home that's serving .VOB files over the LAN, might I suggest that you're doing something horribly wrong? I have to get to my server once every few years, when there's a hardware failure, or I need to throw some more hard drives in, but other than that, I have no idea why you'd need to rack mount a server for your home. Do all you rack-mounters also have a mechanic's pit beneath your garage for changing your oil, too?
I don't respond to AC's.
YEAH! nothing beats RAID on ARM with 2.5MB/s throughput and 5-day rebuilds!
Take a look at the Middle Atlantic Wall mounted racks.
you get get surplus racks fairly cheaply. the point that I haven't seen people make here is that
rack infrastructure makes great* shelving. I have a wall covered with sidewise-oriented 2 post
aluminum telco style racks bolted into the floow. there is some audio gear, switches, servers etc screwed
into these, but also also alot of handmade fixures for mounting hand tools, a custom sandblast cabinet,
some tanks for chemicals, a fairly nice mounting system for pressurized gas tanks, etc. you're not
going to use the floorspace under a wall mounted thingy anyways, and nothing screwed into those
racks is ever* going to fall over.
This was when we were remodeling. The cost was negligible compared to everything else. It's been about 2/3 full ever since, and I have never regretted it.
The thing I do regret is not running enough cable. I put two CAT-5E in each room and it isn't enough. I should have pulled 4 everywhere. I've had to add a couple of runs, and doing that after the walls are closed up is difficult and expensive.
I've found Wifi to be a poor substitute for wired. When two laptops are backing up trying to watch some video is painful.
Perhaps we should stop feeding the troll (yeah I'm guilty there). At least he takes his aggression out on us here rather than on the family at home. :)
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
My home data center consists of three old PCs (two servers and a router, all running Ubuntu Server), a couple of gigabit switches, and a pair of UPSes, stacked in a corner of my crawlspace.
Can you explain your setup and software a little more? I'm looking to do exactly this and it sounds great.
Stackable, you can put wheels on it and comes in different colors...
http://wiki.eth-0.nl/index.php/LackRack
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything.
Are you serious or just being funny? Text compresses well. Video does not. 5GB is nothing. I have more than 10 TB of video from favorite shows/movies, almost another TB in photos, and about 300 GB of ripped music.
And that data is completely new everyday? You can't steal, rip or buy movies faster than a Wi-Fi connection could back it up. The grandparent has it correct... Wi-Fi fits be bill for most home needs.
Being a radio geek, I would run coax and cat5 to the roof for an ATSC antenna, a satellite dish & POE Wifi APs (such as a Ubiquiti Pico2).
Good grief. If you're going to run a home network, what the heck do you need a fire breathing data center for? I have done this at my house for my family. I have Cat5 cable running through the house. But no matter how hard I have tried to predict the future of technology, I have missed the boat too often. Forget all the big power hungry servers and resources. It's ridiculous to build a home system that requires active external cooling. The most I have needed was sharing files, printers, DHCP, firewall, webserver, domain controller and a few misc goodies. I have done this all on some tiny super low power Via based mini-ITX based motherboards. The darn things together use fewer watts than my workstation. Most of them run notebook 2.5 inch low power drives. An enclosed area can get pretty hot, but these don't. My one big main server for sharing video, music and other stuff does run some 7200 RPM 3.5" drives, but they go into hibernate when they haven't been used for a while, then do a wake a request is made. Those are 2TB SATA drives that are mirrored. I do want more storage though. I connect my computer, my kids computers and all the TV's. I use some of the TV's for monitors too. I connect the Sony PS3's and I also have a wireless network for my laptop. I have 2 printers. A standard B&W laser printer and a nice color inkjet . I only have 1 RJ45 per room. I use a hub or switch there if I need more. I can control all the security via the main server. I run my own domain too. Anyway, it let's me control what my kids can do or guests. My network is controlled by Linux too. I don't need a rack, or special cooling or any of that stuff. Beware of over engineering. It's all a few tiny cases sitting sideways on a closet shelf. I have ripped my favorite movies and stored them on my servers. I also ripped my entire CD collection of music. It never skips on music or video. I have 2 external USB interface drivew for a backups that I rotate. I always keep one of these at the office in case the house burns down. This is an on going project that has been a lot of fun. Keeping it all cool and the electricity bill is negligable.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
A few RB250G switches and some mini-itx servers. I mount them all on a DIN rail on my garage wall. from there I have Cat 5e to every room in the house.
Nullius in verba
We did some renovation work on our new office suite and since we had access to the bare walls, we did all the cat6 wiring ourselves. Here's what I came up with.
* The biggest recommendation I'd make is for you to install good conduits to all your rooms and rooms you might even *remotely* think about expanding network access to. Don't just staple your lines to the 2x4 since that makes it impossible to secure new line later. Factor in the bulk of the cat6 you're running through conduits and make sure you've got plenty of breathing room. You can usually muscle cables through with lubrication, but save yourself the aggravation of having the cable-pull slip off.
* Keep in mind the directions that you'll be pulling from and make sure that the cables can be pulled without snagging or going around sharp angles. We use angled joints in the appropriate direction for a pull.
* Leave pull cords/strings inside conduits to each outlet and secure both ends so they don't get pulled inside the conduit later. You'll be thankful later when you have to expand one outlet for your spouse's new printer.
* Label *both* ends of pull cords and strings.
Oh yeah, and future proof. Estimate high on outlet usage, use the latest cable standards (assuming it's still 6), and again don't be stingy running cable to rooms you don't think you'll need. If you don't run cable, at least run the conduit and pull-string for later. That Ethernet port might come in handy when you decide to put in a streaming set-top box in the kitchen.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Does your switch link at1001 Mbit as well? "Yeah, but these go to eleven."
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
'nuff said.
Dag B
I had the house run with a star config, multiple drops in each room, and multiple runs for both rg6 and cat6 to the utilities all back to my central server area. I have a DWR-24-17PD http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/wall/dwr.htm mounted to the studs. Plenty of room in the rack, it swings out and I'm able to access the back. I've been running this config since 2006. I had custom enclosures made for my machines, as the rack can realistically only hold things about 13" deep, but the folks at www.protocase.com made the process of getting custom cases easy.
Here are somethings you really should think about:
Add more drops then you think you will need before the drywall goes up, trust me a few years down the road you will wish you had more.
If you ever plan on getting satellite remember that you need far more runs of rg6 then you would think.
Also think about multiplexing OTA from the attic and the output from a media server from your rack.
Have your builder install a HVAC supply and return in the room that will house the rack.
Most importantly install sound proofing in all the walls around the rack, consider even adding a muffle on the bottom of the door.
Plan to replace fans with quieter ones, and harddrives with quite or silent ones.
Get a good UPS for the server room.
Get a good firewall to cover the entire house and allows you to place a machine or two in the DMZ.
Use separation on the switch to keep the wifi/LAN/DMZ separate
Have all the cables simply terminate at a patch panel, trust me this will save you a headache when you need to reorganize something. Also do not let the builder install any of their usual splitters, say for phone distribution, as they tend to degrade the signals and if you run it to the patch panel you can map the rg6 and cat6 drops as needed, and split things with higher end equipment. The builder will likely add a surcharge for everything they do. So stick to just have them run the cables, sound proofing BEFORE the drywall goes up, and framing it proper for the rack if you want to attach it to the wall.
My builder used a structured wire panel insert in the wall which makes sound proofing that portion nearly impossible.
I found that my builder was unfamiliar with networking and I had to redo several of the drops that did not test right. So you might be better off not having them connect it up and getting your own patch panel that handles multiple types of cables.
If only social loot (See cash for tweets thread) were advertising these guys http://www.datalinksales.com/network_racks_furniture/wallmount/home.htm I could be making a fortune on slash dot :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Around our house, we have a Cat6 cable tucked just under the couch so when you're sitting down and suddenly find yourself trying to move a lot of data off a laptop, you can plugin fairly easily.
You can also maybe take a look at the APC netshelter cx range...
If you ask a question why don't you explain what your goal is. I would recommend with the other suggestion. Go with the sex dungeon as you must be into live porno video feeds.
What I've seen and liked the most is a closet style closet. Make it look like its a closet, but not in a place where people will open the door and try to hang their coats.
In my apartment we chose the utility room. I put a 42U rack in and the apartment came with Cat5E and coax to every room.
Some advise is when you build your own, Always over-do it. Put twice the cable in you'd want to. Why not - it will only get more expensive to do this later. What if you put Cat6 on the east wall in the bedroom, but want to put a smart tv on the west wall, or south?
Smart Home conduits or just regular pvc conduits with pull strings and face plates for future cabling are definetly recommended. We did that in my parents home when the electriction left angry because we were already doing 4 Ethernet, coax, and speaker to each room and thought we were crazy to want more.
Use a musical equipment rack, the ones they use to hold amplifiers and other stage equipment. They're just the right size, wheeled, both sides accessible, and if you ever need to transport them you can just clamp the covers on and chuck it in the boot.
but these wall-mounted racks scream 'switch-only' racks to me. What are your experiences? Is it possible to put servers in racks like these, or should I find a 'both-side-accessible' rack instead?"
Indeed. For a wall-mounted rack, stick with half-depth components. Such as switches, routers, and patch panels. And stay away from components that require full rack depth.
Possibly very small shallow-depth 1U servers, but make sure to get enough U to have spacing between components.
Since you're building the place, I would kind of suggest making the room large enough for full access. with minimum 3ft clearance front and back, and ensure adequate exhaust of hot air out the back and import of cool air in the front. Consider using a metal cabinet.
Pick up and move? Temporary cables? Are you seriously trolling or what? I do multi gig transfers daily and mostly automatically. Streaming 1080p to multiple clients (...)
Makes you an outlier, perhaps one of the _extreme_ outliers that the GP suggested. Multiple 1080p streams? Really? Just how many TV shows & movies are out there worth watching these days, let alone all at once?
I have a 42U telco rack in my garage. I terminated all my cable leads and data/voice leads (I ran Cat5E for all of those; it was several years ago before Cat6 was a prevalent or I'd have gone that way) into standard punch panels as well. It's proven very useful. I have a couple of rack mount power strips as well as a 1U switch. The only thing I'd have changed is perhaps going to a 4 post rack to better allow installation of servers. I have a couple of rack mount servers and no easy way to mount them in the telco rack (I'm aware of the kits, but they are both bulky and somewhat expensive).
Just another ignorant American.
If it's including patch panels, switches and server(s) then you should just get a little half height rack on casters.
We set up wall mount racks all the time that have swing arms. Something like this.... http://www.serverrackoptions.com/onlinecatalog/wall-mount/wall-mount-swing-gate-racks.htm
If your backups to the server need gig-e, you're doing it wrong. Using rsync, I was able to backup 5GB of e-mail over an ADSL connection (12mbit) in 14 minutes, because it compresses everything.
Are you serious or just being funny? Text compresses well. Video does not. 5GB is nothing. I have more than 10 TB of video from favorite shows/movies, almost another TB in photos, and about 300 GB of ripped music.
And that data is completely new everyday? You can't steal, rip or buy movies faster than a Wi-Fi connection could back it up. The grandparent has it correct... Wi-Fi fits be bill for most home needs.
Even a few hundred megs takes an uncomfortably long time to transfer over wi-fi though. Heaven help you if you're taking a system image backup - which is worth doing every now and again.
Don't think of your home network the way you think of your work network. Buy a small consumer wifi router with a few RJ45 jacks (Linksys or whatever), run cable between your office and your media room, and use wifi everywhere else. Keep your "server" in your office.
I don't care how big a network nerd you are at work, there is no possible way you're going to saturate a home network built on wireless-N and gigabit ethernet. And while having a 4U server in your basement may make your work buddies grunt with approval, I guarantee you it'd be much more convenient and useful to have the same crap in a mid-size tower desktop in your office.
One thing I miss in my home is 240V electric supply for my computer equipment. In most North American homes, the only places you find 240V is by large appliances like the oven, clothes dryer, water heater, HVAC, and perhaps the electric car. But you also want it for your home computers. You can get twice the watts per outlet, and your power supplies run more efficiently with 240V. Most (though not all) technology equipment has switching power which plays nicely with 240V, so the only nuisance is managing different cordsets with funny looking plugs.
Nothing fancy, two RJ-45 per room, four in the living room, and that's basically it.
You will probably want more than 4 jacks behind the TV. I made that mistake, and recently needed a fifth jack. Luckily my Sonos box (ZP90) has another jack.
I have a TiVo Series 3, Xbox 360, Apple TV, Sonos ZP90, and a Panasonic Blu-ray player. It's not crazy to think I'll want to add something else, so I'd recommend at least 6 jacks behind the TV.
You may need a specific rack designed for the rails. Cost may be a little higher, but they work fantastic for accessing the rack.
I also saw the wheels on rack suggestion. I recommend both. I like ease-of-use.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slashdot will hate me but.....
Server is a WHS box and the PC clients are all Win 7 boxes. All machines do full backups to the server.
Each TV in the house has a WDTV Live running WDLXTV hooked up to it. These stream 1080p high bit-rate from the server.
There are a number of slideout and rotatable rack systems out there. I found this one in a couple of minutes. http://www.cableorganizer.com/home-theater-system/SRSR-rotating-sliding-rail-system.htm
What kind of home network is this and what can you do with all these servers? Is he talking about installing ethernet jacks into all of his rooms? What is the server rack for? Don't the ethernet cables need to all go to a switch or router?
living room 4
3 bedrooms 6
kitchen 2
dining room 2
breakfast area 2
den 2
Right there is 18
Add in my personal wishes for basement, garage, and workshop gets 24.
Interesting thing is I don't use my wired network for computers, generally. I have TV's on them. The new systems use a connection for each device, so TV and blue ray are 2 ports. I use wireless for most of the computers.
No, I do not have this many TV's or computers. This is how many connections I would like in my house.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Her .... if its a self built server why don't you just bring all the connectivity to the front (motherboard 180 rotation)
We're talking about a switch and a light server. You can mount the switch on anything, just have the server sit on a shelf in a standard mATX case. It will look just fine, it's much more flexible than a rackmount, and you can add more by (shock) just putting another one next to it on the shelf!
Don't overthink the solutions to your problems. Simplicity is king.
With a little creativity you can put your server anywhere at home, garage or whatever. http://www.dustshield.com/p-64-telephony-and-rack-enclosure.aspx http://www.dustshield.com/t-products.aspx Go CRAZY FOLKS! GO CRAZY! Seriously, you can store these on HOTH and they are blaster proof.
Since the walls are now open, just wire the ethernet switches inside the wall cavities. Most modern routers, switches and computer disk drives can be vertically mounted within the 3 1/2 inch cavity. After installing the equipment, push fiberglass R-19 insulation around them to soundproof and hold them in place. Then drywall over both sides.
Afterwards, you can add additional wires by punching holes in the drywall, then filling in with plaster. Sometimes the insulation can get in the way. But this is an advantage because it keeps the heat from escaping through the wires. If you hear any rattling, pour a few ounces of acrylic superglue into the cavity, from a hole near the top of the wall.
You can build drywall hinges that let you open the entire access area, but this may be overkill. Ask your builder to use asphalt composition shingles to finish the wall, so that any rainwater in your basement will not damage the ethernet POE connections. Extra shingles can be rackmounted inside a standard 42U system, and then wired using 220volt Hubble connectors.
Conduit is probably unnecessary unless you expect to run wires and/or optical fiber and/or wifi communications between your switch and your ultimate access points. Quality plenum-rated 2.4GHz radio connections are usually adequate for today's applications, but for future expansion, I strongly suggest Helical RG-8/U Coaxial Cable mounted inside Heliarc-welded Cat-6B cable with 29" Hg Vacuum Rating and 1-1/2" NPSM Male x Female Cam And Groove Connections. This has worked well for our commercial installation, but you *must* allow adequate room for a technician to reach inside the Cat-6B cable, to remove any TCP/IP packets that get stuck.
As an alternative, you can build the entire data center inside a commercial-grade Klein Bottle.
There are various sizes, of wall swing out racks available. They mount on the wall and look like a cabinet/rack. but if you need the cables or back side, they just swing out (like opening a pantry door with shelves/stuff on the inside of the door.
It may not be as 'perfect' as a 72U rack where you can get to the inside and out, but it might work for a house 'server/networking closet'.
and bolt them to the floor.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
If you have money to spare, look at Middle Atlantic's products: http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/main.htm
They have a wide assortment of wall-mount/slide-out/pivoting/etc. racks that are well built. Other posters have mentioned flimsiness and access difficulties for wall-mounted systems. You won't run into those problems with Middle Atlantic. They sell damn nice units.
No, I don't work for Middle Atlantic. No, I'm not a paid shill. My last company purchased several MA racks and we were thrilled with them.
I work for a major university and every two weeks at our surplus store (open to the public) they have at least 3-5 racks. Now, we are an R1 institution so aside from computers, racks for science equipment abound. You can pick up what would easily be $500-600 rack for $25. Everything I've seen has been on wheels. The only downside is it will likely be 42U. Max flexibility if you have the space.
Depending on what kind of construction and design your house has, it may not be easy to run new connectivity to your rooms. But if you can do it (e.g. the guy building a new house), what you really should run is conduit. Sure, Cat6 Ethernet wire's going to be good for the next few years, but maybe you need HDMI cables instead, or fiber for your digital audio system, or TV coax, or whatever standard works 10 years from now. If you want to support wire, run whatever size conduit makes sense given your physical constraints, and if you need to run wire, run it inside the conduits. If you're lucky, you won't need them, because everything will be wireless, and if that happens you can use them for centralized vacuum systems or whatever.
(Of course, I've never done this myself :-) Back when I had a 2-story house, it had lath-and-plaster walls, and really antique phone wires, so the first floor got a few small holes in the floor to run phone wire to the basement, and the cable TV people punched through the outside wall into the living room. I'm currently in a condo, and all the data runs on wireless, most of the phones are cordless, and there are several generations of badly installed cable TV.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Copper? By the time you're done making up your mind on what rack to use 10ge will be cheap. A house costs a few hundred thousand dollars and you can't spare a few extra hundred for fiber to the rooms? This house wreaks of 1990
rj-45?
I'm in the Navy and am therefore used to working with limited space. Several months ago I had to move almost all of my servers off the ship and onto a barge. The room I was given is the proverbial broom closet. The server rack I have may not be "wall mounted" but it's so tight into one of the corners that it might as well be. Let me tell you: trying to work with servers, switches and routers that you can't reach behind to fiddle with is a nightmare. Add to that the issue of restricted airflow and you've got a recipe for unnatural hair loss.
Sincerly,
Your friendly sailor
A friend of mine finished off his cellar and mounded a rack between two rooms (family room and the furnace/work room). ;-)
the rack was an old APC rack that had a mostly solid front door (center clear plastic, vent left/right of it). so he could get to it fron either side. He had RJ45s in most of the rooms but he didn't bother putting any in the bathrooms (I did give him a hard time for that as you would never know when you would need a connection in there in the future.
yes I do have a rack in my office.. (an old rack for DEC RA-91 hard drives)
My wife and I bought our first home last spring, and I knew that I wanted to do something similar with regard to infrastructure.
I picked out a good location in the basement, and mounted a 4'x8' piece of 5-ply plywood on the exposed studs.
Then I bought a 12U swing-away enclosed rack from Tripp Lite, model #SRW12US, and mounted it on the plywood using eight Toggler toggle bolt wall anchors with appropriate bolts and washers. Check out the specs on the different anchors, bolts and washers you buy, but this setup is rated to hold about 530lbs (although the manufacturer indicates that I could theoretically hold up to 2120lbs, but it's not recommended.)
The rack has plenty of space for my patch panel, PoE switch, PDU, and a few 1U servers. What I really like about this rack, through, is that it can be mounted with the door opening to the left or the right, the side panels come off, and the whole front assembly swings away from the wall so that I can work on the back of whatever I have mounted in there. The doors, panels, and swing mechanism all have locks on them that can be opened and closed with the included keys.
Mounting the rack was actually the easy part. Fishing CAT5 through 115 year-old walls of plaster and lathe has been the hard part. ;)