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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 ;)
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
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.
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
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.
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.
He's talking about a server, not a sex dungeon.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
I always wondered if a home server could be water cooled with the cold water supply that ran into your hot water tank. You could even take an old water heater, strip the burner and insulation, and use that as your supply/exchanger tank, as the hot water line won't always be running. My dad did something similar with an old water heater tank to keep the basement cooler for wine storage.
One of these days I might have to try it.
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.
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.
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
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!
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!