02 April, 2018

20u + DIY rack build in progress...

I am calling this a 20u + rack now as I needed more space than the 20u would provide....

I have 4 of the same mainboards, and pretty much everything except cases, which are all very close in specs and dimensions, except one is a different make / model than the others. These were barebones systems from Newegg a few years ago. I am finally getting things put toget6her right.These will end up being the hypervisor nodes The specs are...

AMD FX 3.2GHZ Quad Core
Corsair DDR3 32GB
MSI 970A-G43 mainboards.
2 @ Intel dual port gigabit PCIe ethernet adapters.
single gigabit TrendNet PCIe Ethernet adapter
MSI Radeon 6450 2GB graphics cards.
512GB 6GB/s SATA 7200rpm Western Digital HDDs
Samsung SATA DVDRW

All 4 of these measure up to be just at 4u high when flipped sideways and put on the rack rails.

That consumes 16u.

Then there are the 2 TrendNet TEG-S16DG 16 port 1u gigabit switches. That brings me to 18u.
I will need 1u of space to apss cables from the front of the switch to the back. That means the switches plus the pass through space gets me up to 19u.

The head node, which will also be my storage filer consists of a slender desktop and an 8 bay eSATA RAID enclosure. The head node and storage enclosure will be racked together, but they take up a combined 5u of space

The rails being 20u, are 35" tall, the 1x4 lumber consumes 7" for the top and bottom spreaders, meaning that they use 42" vertical space.

Now go back 1.75" for the 1u already allotted, and that gives me 7.5" with the 48" uprights. Close, but not close enough. I need 10.5" or about 6u where I have just over 4u space to work with...

So the storage box can't go here. For now.

If you don't recall, the plan was to put a top on the rack, and place the UPSes there, well the RAID box is going to have to go there for now as well....

I have the lumber cut, I have the hole locations for hte screws marked and ready to go.

I am charging my cordless drill to do the drilling work. I am going to pre drill all my screw holes, mark off the locations where the pieces meet so I can mask them off, then I am going to pre paint all the pieces, and once cured, assmelbe this thing, with a considerable amount of glue to insure it doesn't ever give up on me....

My long term plan for this rack, is to lay my hands on 4 2u ATX cases that are compatible with a standard ATX 12v / PS2 style power supply. I have high end power supplies that I am not going to get into here, that I do not want to retire. Recall this is an office yes, but it is also a music room / studio. So even though it is going into the closet next to the room, I want to insure sinlence is the sound of the day!