Show Us Your Racks

We have a beefy split system portable unit that we use to cool an upstairs office so that will be our redundancy, in all fairness we can open the door to the offices if it gets too bad. Ventilation in the offices isn't an issue, it's a brand new building so has a very high insulation rating and a fancy ventilation system.

Here are a couple more images of the studding and trunking changes, i'm just playing with positions of the cabinet for now as i have about 20 or so more cables to run.

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My new GS752TXP-100NES was delivered yesterday, although i'm starting to wonder if 48 points is enough (will be for now!).

We have an external IT company that does all the smart stuff for us, we're running an NEC IP phone system, the thin clients we use will piggy back to those as the phones are limited to 100mb, which is enough for our thin clients speed wise. I have however still put in two points per station.

I will have to bite the bullet and buy a new server at some point as the one we have is starting to show its age every time we add a new thin client. My desire is to get all our admin staff, engineers and sales people onto thin clients (15 people).

Plan for today is to get a 32 amp feed installed with an isolator for future aircon as suggested, route some more cables from downstairs and get them all labelled up properly. I also need to run some cables in for future CCTV install and 2 access points in the factory.

I'm toying with the idea of leaving 300mm behind the cabinet to drop any excess cable into and allow easy access for pulling more cables at a later date.

As always advice is welcome!!
 
drew said:
We have a beefy split system portable unit that we use to cool an upstairs office so that will be our redundancy, in all fairness we can open the door to the offices if it gets too bad. Ventilation in the offices isn't an issue, it's a brand new building so has a very high insulation rating and a fancy ventilation system.
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Similar to us - as long as you get enough warning (eg. what if it fails at 5pm on a Friday?) and you have a plan in place.

My new GS752TXP-100NES was delivered yesterday, although i'm starting to wonder if 48 points is enough (will be for now!).
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We have Netgear throughout, reasonable price, good warranty (which we've used once or twice over the years without issue). However if I had the choice I'd go for something a bit better next time, probably HP Procurve. They have odd errors and (rare) restarts. In the swing of things, no biggy but still not what we want.

We have an external IT company that does all the smart stuff for us, we're running an NEC IP phone system, the thin clients we use will piggy back to those as the phones are limited to 100mb, which is enough for our thin clients speed wise. I have however still put in two points per station.
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Ditto - we have a consultancy to advise and configure the big stuff, although I'm trying to learn enough to not rely on them. We tried the same with the IP phones but ended up seperating it all out after all sorts of issues. We never did find out if it was the horizon platform, the ISP, the switches or what :(

I'm toying with the idea of leaving 300mm behind the cabinet to drop any excess cable into and allow easy access for pulling more cables at a later date.
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Make sure you've got plenty of access. When we got our cupboard built I asked for 2m wide by 2.5 deep. We got 1m x 2m and it's awful. Don't need to access it often, but when we do I always end up with a headache.
 
Thanks for the replies, i can whip the side of the cabinet to do any cabling if i need to.

The plan is to leave enough space for the child labour we employ to climb in. Just kidding.

I'll give myself some more room to play with. Pics will be up later, our electrical factors let me down on a dado t piece so thats held me up finishing that part.

I'm where i want to be so far.
 
drew said:
Thanks for the replies, i can whip the side of the cabinet to do any cabling if i need to.

The plan is to leave enough space for the child labour we employ to climb in. Just kidding.

I'll give myself some more room to play with. Pics will be up later, our electrical factors let me down on a dado t piece so thats held me up finishing that part.

I'm where i want to be so far.
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What happens when (not if, when) you need to get at something at the back of the rack but on the opposite side from the side panel you can remove? You're possibly in luck if there's space immediately above or below what you need to work on but changes are you'll be swearing at the lack of access.

This really isn't how I'd setup a room but then I don't have to run it so it isn't my problem.
 
The only things in the rack that are fixed will be a switch and the patch panel.

The routers are sitting on a shelf. I haven't decided on a 1u server or a tower. Either way i think i'll have space to climb in if i really need to.

I will centralised the rack in the room and that should give me room to go down each side.

I completely overkilled the size of the rack just to give me room to work on it.
 
Hoped to be further on by now and have the walls and door in place, that's not my area so have to wait on the partitioning guys to get on with it.

I have however installed 46 of the 52 cables going in.

Go easy this is my first time. They've all been tested and work so thats a good thing. I tok onboard the space comments and have left enough room to get around the back and slack in the cables to allow some manoeuvring of the cabinet if needed.

I have to sort out the cables but they're all numbered and routed, just needs tidying.

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Hope to have all this completed by Thursday. A couple of the sales staff are coming in next week so need to be up and running by then.

We are about to order a new server, this is the spec.

Dell PowerEdge T430

  • 2 x Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 v3 2.4GHz,20M Cache,8.00GT/s QPI,Turbo,HT,8C/16T (85W) Max
    4 x 32GB RDIMM, 2133 MT/s, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width
    PERC H730 RAID Controller
    3 x 600GB 15K RPM SAS 12Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
    Windows Server 2012 R2

This will give you a 16 core server with 128 GB memory. The cost for this is £4027 + vat.

Thoughts?
 
We'll be running thin clients for most of our staff (14) but could be 20 this time next year. They use, word, access, sage, excel, outlook, stock software called inFlow. We store a lot of clients pdf reports for calibration as well.

Emails are on 365.
 
Wondering why a tower instead of rackmount?

For that drive size, RAID 5 is OK - but 10 is considered better. Not much storage though.
 
Has whoever has specced the server done a business analysis to see what is actually needed? What is it replacing?
 
#Chri5# said:
Would take a RAID10 over RAID5 for RDS use

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/262196-one-big-raid-10-the-new-standard-in-server-storage

Presume redundant Power Supplies are included as well.
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Whilst SAM speaks a lot of sense - and for new build I would agree RAID 10 is better than 5 - we're running two RDS servers each with about 50 users on 3x300GB in RAID 5 without any issue at all. If all it's doing is RDS on small drives, RAID 5 is fine IMO (but again 10 is better practice).
 
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