Show Us Your Racks

oli356 · 16 Aug 2012 at 16:25

It looks all lonely

Cheap rack though, good stuff. These 42U racks can be had on ebay for great prices - cheaper then my 16U rack was! But yeah.... I can't get it under the door and up stairs, I don't think my parents want a massive ugly rack in the dining room either

kalvindeane · 16 Aug 2012 at 16:38

He is indeed very lonely.

Give me your stuff to keep him company?

Can only fit 12U in this, but I'm really chuffed with it.

Might buy some wheels for it at some point, would only be about £5 I guess.

JoeF1 · 16 Aug 2012 at 16:39

Wire management makes me dribble.

Awesome.

[Darkend]Viper · 16 Aug 2012 at 16:50

Well i'm on the lookout for a rack, but needs to be deep enough to take servers!! And definately not 42u, would settle for a 12 or 24 one that could be sat in the garage as the wife wouldn't take kindly to having a huge ugly thing (her words) sat in the spare room!!

Deleted member 77746 · 16 Aug 2012 at 17:10

I sold mine to a member on here. I payed 150 for it and if I remember rightly he purchased it for 50.

Shad · 19 Aug 2012 at 12:35

Just spent a rather sweaty few hours clearing out some space in our loft and reorganising my kit.

Just doing what I can with what I have really! It'll all move to a rack in the garage in the spring hopefully. I've had to shutdown the PE2950 because of the heat at the moment

Next job is to replace the FS726T and GS105 with a single GS724T.

DJMK4 · 19 Aug 2012 at 22:45

What you running on those servers and what for? Lofts are always abit iffy, hot summers will be a nightmare and damp cold winters could cause problems I would have thought, looks good though

I dont really want to take pics of works racks, I may get a sly pic on here. Have 24 full height racks, some filled, some waiting to be filled. That's just in one of our suites

we have another suite which at the moment holds 7 racks and suite is being taken up by one client.

Another which is still being refurbished, we have a hall about the size of a school gym. That's. Ot been split in two one half for our new support room and the other half a data hall, no idea how many we can fit in but it's going to be quite a few (more than 24 thats for sure

)

Shad · 20 Aug 2012 at 07:58

Yeah the heat over the last few days has been a problem but I've not had any trouble in the winter before, the kit tends to keep the loft warm enough.

The server on the left is in the process of being decommissioned and rebuilt, it will be secondary DC and DNS, and NAS (up to 24Tb). It's a basic Celeron G540 system with a Dell SAS 6 controller. The PE2950 I'm still configuring but since it's got a fair bit of poke it's going to be doing a bit more. Primary DC and DNS, DHCP, SQL 2008/2012, TFS 2010 and a 4 drive SSD RAID array on a PERC 6 for my high-speed Infiniband storage project

Speaking of Infiniband, my Mellanox cards should be arriving today or tomorrow. £45 each from eBay, not bad for a dual port 10Gb/s adapter. Only trouble is a 30m fibre cable is going to be about £130... :eek:

Yamahahahahaha · 20 Aug 2012 at 09:38

Shad said:
Next job is to replace the FS726T and GS105 with a single GS724T.

Completely tangential to the topic, but try to get hold of a v1 or v2 GS724T. Many of the new firmwares for the v3 haven't been very stable and end up with the ports not passing traffic, needing a cold reboot to get them going again.

Shad · 20 Aug 2012 at 11:36

Yamahahahahaha said:
Completely tangential to the topic, but try to get hold of a v1 or v2 GS724T. Many of the new firmwares for the v3 haven't been very stable and end up with the ports not passing traffic, needing a cold reboot to get them going again.

Ah ok, thanks. I was aware that the cooling has changed in the v3 as they've replaced the small heatsinks and fan with one large heatsink and no fan. I was going to buy a new v3 but sounds like it could be worth buying a used v1/2 from the 'Bay

Cheers!

antc · 20 Aug 2012 at 13:44

oli356 said:
Dantrak.at -- They do things differently though. You don't purchase from the site like you do here. All prices/stock is kept on http://www.venelin.com/public/Stock_Price_List.xls and then you email them, they send you an invoice and you send the money directly to their bank (cost £10 for the international bank transfer).

My experience hasn't been pleasant! The casters were missing, after multiple emails (they are slow at replying) the casters got resent. Then a part of metal wasn't fitting and was bent. The bend wasn't the only problem though, measurements somewhere were off. More emails to them.... I had been speaking to the American Dantrak (good customer support) and they had to end up sending the Austrian store money to cover the postage for the replacement part, on top of them giving them another! Rant over....Hopefully have the parts and have it built by mid-next week

The UK store though will be up and running within a month!

Think I will wait for the uk store!

Any news on a web address for the uk store (if you are allowed to post itm not sure on the rules)

oli356 · 20 Aug 2012 at 14:10

antc said:
Think I will wait for the uk store!

Any news on a web address for the uk store (if you are allowed to post itm not sure on the rules)

http://www.dantrak.co.uk/category/17 Not got the Model C 16U, the 10U B model is not a bad price at all!

Possibly awaiting stock still.

pdw8 · 20 Aug 2012 at 15:40

Shad said:
Speaking of Infiniband, my Mellanox cards should be arriving today or tomorrow. £45 each from eBay, not bad for a dual port 10Gb/s adapter. Only trouble is a 30m fibre cable is going to be about £130...

What connector and fibre type are you after? Have loads so might be able to help you out if you cover the postage.

mejinks · 20 Aug 2012 at 17:34

DJMK4 said:
...

That looks familiar for some reason...

Would love to be involved in the planning and execution of such a space.

DJMK4 · 20 Aug 2012 at 19:16

mejinks said:
That looks familiar for some reason...

Would love to be involved in the planning and execution of such a space.

I think you asked me if there was any jobs going a while ago if I remember correctly?

Images have been removed for now might post back *get very paranoid about posting pics of the DC on the web* not sure if some rack pictures are allowed. Someone in work could see this

Shad · 20 Aug 2012 at 20:27

pdw8 said:
What connector and fibre type are you after? Have loads so might be able to help you out if you cover the postage.

Dropped you an email via Trust

CX4-CX4 is what I'm after, either fibre or copper really, good enough for SDR at the moment (10Gbps roughly).

trancesphere · 20 Aug 2012 at 20:50

Shad said:
Speaking of Infiniband, my Mellanox cards should be arriving today or tomorrow. £45 each from eBay, not bad for a dual port 10Gb/s adapter. Only trouble is a 30m fibre cable is going to be about £130...

They are cheap because they dont support TCP offloading.

If your planning to use TCP you will only see around 2Gbps.

Shad · 20 Aug 2012 at 21:30

I'm going to start with IPoIB but only because the server with the RAID array in it will be Windows (there's no SRP/RDMA target for Windows at the moment). The problem with IPoIB is that it's CPU intensive but most of the numbers from people trying it out are old and before OFED added connected mode to the driver stack, which should help things along. Both machines in my project are quite powerful so it will be interesting to see what kind of numbers I get

slylittlefox · 20 Aug 2012 at 22:16

Will be interested to hear what numbers you get!

ajf · 20 Aug 2012 at 22:56

Some of these photos make me really jealous

Do a lot of you work in datacenters or are these just 'typical' larger companies?

We only have one real rack of servers (most are virtual) plus two/three for switches.
Switches are betting upgraded to Force 10s though which are supposed to be the wotsits apparently.