I’m primarily used to using Computer Towers as basic servers for the company I’ve been administrating for a while. And we now wish to move away from that to a rack facility. I have no idea (not the slightest clue) as to how these things work. There’s just a few questions I would like to ask: Do rack-mounter servers have OS’s? Do I configure these servers directly or from another computer? Say for instance I [...]

We just got a couple of HP DL360 G7′s, and I notice it has vents on the top. More hot air seems to exit through these vents than it does anywhere on the back. All our servers in the past have always vented all the hot air through the back. How are these servers with top vents supposed to be mounted? Everyone always says airflow is best by not leaving gaps on the rack, but [...]

The cooled server cabinet was discussed here before but I found my question is a little bit different. We have a client with some servers running into incredible bad conditions. The servers are in the middle of the office and cooled by a regular fan. Finally the company agreed to host the servers in a proper environment. The problem is that they don’t have a room for the servers, but one can be built. There [...]

We just took delivery of a new Avaya 2500 48-port switch, that has 24 PoE ports. The problem is that all the PoE ports are on the left-hand size of the switch, and our PoE device cables can only reach the right-hand side of the switch (we’re upgrading from an old switch to a new one, and the old one had them on the right-hand side. This is the problem with doing neat cabling). Can [...]

I’m working on a network project where the networking equipment is located in utility closets which aren’t very secure. I’d like to put all the networking equipment and servers in free-standing (ie, not mounted to the wall) locking rack cabinets. The problem is that the networking patch panels are all on punch blocks (some are 1U others are 4U), rather than making use of keystone jacks. What’s the best way to get the patch panels [...]

We’re planning to host our website for the first time for ourselves. We have currently have a linode of 8 gigs and the memory is going up to 90% most of the time. So I want to move my website to my own server with huge RAM. So this will be first time to manage any physical hardware of a server. So I came across IBM’s BladeCenter, found them interesting. So can I just buy [...]

In which cases do you think that a Blade is better than a rackmount, in a virtualization environment? If you think that blades are much better than Rack, then why facebook prefers rackmount? Blades can cram some incredibly dense computing power into a rack. Let’s say you configure an 8-blade chassis, and each blade is identical: 4x 12-Core Opterons 256Gb RAM That’s 384 cores and 2TB of RAM in about 10RU. Your power consumption is [...]

I was given the task of (re)organizing cables in one of our racks, and I have never done this before. What system/equipment do you use to organize your cables? The rack I have is 23″ and has 19″ equipment installed in it. Not all equipment has power and ethernet on the same side We have a 48 port forward facing switch in the rack We have ~25 Ethernet and fiber cables coming in from above. [...]

I have a couple of Dell 1U rackmount servers that I need to temporarily move out of a rack. Is it bad for them to be stacked on top of eachother? Not really. I’ve got 4 Dell PowerEdge servers stacked one on top of another right now. There’s really no risk of collapsing the bottom servers from the weight of the top servers and there’s really no risk of overheating, as the servers draw cool [...]

I need a cheap setup to store historic snapshots of a dataset in the 100-200GB range. These will see little use, but need to be kept online for some time (shared by Samba). The box housing the dataset is a Dell PowerEdge 750 with a PCI-X CERC 6-channel SATA controller. It has 4 SATA channels free. I am considering the following setup. Your experience with similar solutions would be greatly appreciated. I would add a [...]