Avi Freedman writes:
[Alexis writes:]
Does anyone know of a *small* rackmount case for PCs? By this I mean one that doesn't chew up quite so much vertical room as the usual boxes.
Yes, look in computer shopper. There are some short rack-mount PCs. I'm trying to get pricing on them now.
Neat, you can tell me what you learn. :-)
And Crystal makes dream rackmounts; 4 across, 8 down in a 7' x 19" rack. But I suspect they're hideously expensive. They use passive backplanes :(
I've seen these. If you're going that route, you can use the Multitech case or others with separable ISA backplanes. You'll get about the same density, and I think it works out a whole lot cheaper.
One of the annoying problems using an intel box instead of a sun is that there's no real console. If it dies, the only way to kick it remotely is with a remote-control power switch. These are expensive and unwieldy, not mounting nicely in racks.
I think I told you about these :) $500 or so from Black Box, 15 or 20amps across the whole switch, but it's code-activated and has 8 outlets. I guess you'd probably plug it into a terminal server port. [...]
Yes, in fact I noticed this while I was checking their catalog for the switch info. 15amps, which is enough for 8 Intel CPUs, as long as you're not running 4GB drives on each one.
Lastly, I've seen this really neat rackmount chassis from Multitech. It's got 22 ISA slots, severable into up to 9 parts, and enough drive bays to actually run 9 separate servers. If you're looking for maximal density it seems like a good bet. The only problem I can see is that you'll need CPUs with both SCSI and viseo on board (thus my first question) unless you're willing to run on IDE drives. I figure that for light or medium-use servers, ethernet over ISA should be fine.
Roughly how much?
Um, well, I've run machines taking a few million web hits a day using ISA Ethernet boards. I doubt you could push a machine to the wall without using more than a T1. Maybe several T1s. /a