[ale] Tower to Rack conversion

[Vernard Martin]

On Mon, 2001-12-17 at 17:51, Dow Hurst wrote:
> Is there an easy way to convert a tower based server to rackmount using
> a kit?  Does anyone have such a kit available?
> 
> A friend who is looking at moving his business from NT/IIS/MS-SQL/ASP to
> LAMP or some such setup is currently looking to move his servers to a
> colocation facility.  He has to get 4 servers (3 staging servers, 1
> production) into as small a space as is doable on a low budget.  He has
> suggested a conversion kit idea, but I don't know much about racks and
> building rack based servers.  Any ideas here?  He uses about 20Gb
> bandwidth per month and would like to keep the monthly bill below
> $500/month.  I think he has talked to Qwest and is thinking over the
> deal.  Thanks,

If the tower machines are standard commodity off the shelf components,
then transfering the innards of them to standard 19" rackmount cases
isn't that difficult. And depending on how much innards are there, he
can get away with 2U units. Otherwise he's probably going to have to us
4U units which are a bit expensive. You can find pricing and specs on 4U
cases at just about anywhere. I usually go to http://www.caseoutlet.com
just to get a visual of the units but I don't buy from there.

The main thing about rackmount servers is heat. If you are trying to put
Dual 1.2GB athlon MP systems into a 1U hit box, it ain't gonna happen
without some seriously expenditure of money. Those cpus generate too
much heat to be dissapated by any stock fan that is going to fit in a 1U
box. however, if you look around you can find several vendors selling
complete cases (sometimes with motherboards inside as well) that are
precision designed to fit everything in and provide adequte cooling for
high end cpus. As usual, the more money you the spend, the better the
solution is.

hope this helps

V
-- 
Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/     
        "Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. But Glory. Glory lasts forever."

---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.