Cabinet for dell poweredge and cisco switches

xerouk · 10 Mar 2011 at 18:47

Hi i am currently studying for my ccent and soon to start for the windows server exams i might be buying some old switches and servers from friends i was wondering if most cabinets you buy can fit both network equipment and servers:

I think they said the servers were dell poweredge 2650 and the switches are Cisco 2950 switches.

I have never really looked at cabinets before but thought it would be much tidier than just stacking them somewhere.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks in advance

paradigm · 10 Mar 2011 at 22:45

Any cabinet you buy that will be deep enough for the servers will take the switches (and any other networking hardware you care to buy) absolutely fine, the width of a cab is fixed, as is the size of "1u", the only way cabs will vary in size is in height (number of U available), and depth.

Most cabs that will be deep enough for servers will be pretty large though!

xerouk · 11 Mar 2011 at 02:33

Ahh okies so if a server or network device is advertised as 2u or 3u that means it will take up that number of unit slots in a cabinet?

MagicBoy · 11 Mar 2011 at 02:38

xerouk said:
Ahh okies so if a server or network device is advertised as 2u or 3u that means it will take up that number of unit slots in a cabinet?

Yes.

Standard cabinet width is 19", just be careful of the depth. A rackmount server can be a couple of feet deep, switches are much less - typically less than 12".

paradigm · 11 Mar 2011 at 07:49

MagicBoy said:
typically less than 12".

Typically?

Most of our Cisco kit (switches, wireless lan controller, redundant psu, etc) is 12" or longer, it's only our 1811 that isn't. Sure we have some old crappy D-Link switches that are short, but they really are garbage.

kefkef · 11 Mar 2011 at 09:48

A poweredge 2650 will need a 900mm depth rack i seem to recall.

3dcandy · 11 Mar 2011 at 11:30

Yup, most older PE's are 900mm depth (well 850 but then you need the extra for cables etc.)

MagicBoy · 11 Mar 2011 at 12:38

paradigm said:
Typically?

Most of our Cisco kit (switches, wireless lan controller, redundant psu, etc) is 12" or longer, it's only our 1811 that isn't. Sure we have some old crappy D-Link switches that are short, but they really are garbage.

Fair enough. Must be some seriously heavy iron. The POE switches we use (2960 I think) are 12" deep, the old 3coms they replace were about 8".

If there's a server going in there it doesn't really matter!