[[APi]TheMan]

I'm looking into purchasing an Xserve to replace a few G3/G4 servers in a lab/server environment and I'm interested in what kind of racks they have for this stuff. We have 3 Powermacs (Blue and White, Yosemite, and Quicksilver towers) that would also be in the rack for other services in this lab.

I have seen racks that housed older PowerMacs (Blue and Whites, etc) but I'm not sure where to look. I'd like to get a rack that could hold both an Xserve and a few older Powermac towers. Has anyone done this?

edit: I found Marathon Computing's G•rack that looks pretty nice, though it doesn't look like it would do well with an Xserve.

[mitchell_pgh]

I would probably go with the G•rack. Looks nice and will work with both.

In a perfect world, you would get that and a shielded rack for the Xserve (to reduce noise).

[[APi]TheMan]

Sweet, in looking at the G•Rack more I see that an Xserve would work fine in it, but I have some questions about rack lingo... When someone specifies a "two post" or a "four post" rack, they're not talking about the number of posts, are they? How can a rack only have two posts...? It makes no sense to me, frankly.

[Mithras]

You're clear that the G-Rack is just a mechanism for attaching a Powermac to a rack, yes? Besides the G-Rack, you'd need the actual rack itself. The XServe does not require a G-Rack since it is already built to be attached to a rack.

Yes, 2-post and 4-post racks have 2 and 4 posts, respectively. 2-post racks are usually intended for fairly light, shallow devices, like telco switches. They have to be pretty well bolted to the floor, obviously.

2-post rack
You'll want a 4-post rack.

The next question to ask yourself is whether you want an open frame, or enclosed:

open frame / enclosed

Apple (and many others) sell an open-frame rack for ~ $500, and enclosed for ~ $1000 - $2000, depending on the height. (Height is measured in U, where 1U = 1.75 inches. As the G-Rack site notes, a Powermac requires 6U. The XServe is just 1U) Whether you should get open or enclosed depends on (a) how much money you want to spend, (b) how much noise you'll tolerate, (c) how sheltered from the elements you want your machines to be. Are people working in this room, or is it out of the way somewhere? Is the noise tolerable for you now?

The superdeluxe option is a noise-reduction cabinet like the XRack by XTremeMac. It is only 12U tall, so not sufficient for your PowerMacs, but it could hold your XServe and maybe an XServeRAID if you ever got one. It is, however, stunningly expensive at $1799.




My recommendation would be to get a 25U enclosed rack, like the APC Netshelter that Apple sells for $989. Put your XServe in there, maybe an XServe RAID if you get some serious storage needs. And you can buy some G-Racks to hold the Powermacs in the rack. Though frankly, if they're happy on the ground now, you might do well to just let them be, depending on how pressing your space needs are.

We're in the process of replacing a slew of desktop 'servers' with some rack-mounted machines ourselves. It's definitely an improvement to consolidate things!

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by Mithras:
You're clear that the G-Rack is just a mechanism for attaching a Powermac to a rack, yes? Besides the G-Rack, you'd need the actual rack itself. The XServe does not require a G-Rack since it is already built to be attached to a rack.

Ah, I don't think I quite got that much. We were considering getting the G•Racks just to get the older Powermacs up off the floor and into some consolidated space, but for ~200 apiece I don't think it's really that big of a deal.

Originally posted by Mithras:
Yes, 2-post and 4-post racks have 2 and 4 posts, respectively. 2-post racks are usually intended for fairly light, shallow devices, like telco switches. They have to be pretty well bolted to the floor, obviously.

2-post rack
You'll want a 4-post rack.

Yep, I figured a 2 post rack wouldn't be for some 33 pound 28 inch deep server like the Xserve. Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.

Originally posted by Mithras:
The next question to ask yourself is whether you want an open frame, or enclosed:

open frame / enclosed

This room is a server room. It's more or less ok if it's a little warmer and louder in this room. Now our servers aren't mission critical data, so it's not top priority that these things have spiffy racks and expensive addons, I'm just exploring options. I'm not sure how much we want to spend, but I think we'd be ok with an open frame rack, as we'll only have this one Xserve and possibly the 3 Powermacs in it just because if we were going to stick the Xserve in a rack we might as well get a rack for all the servers, ya know?

I'll check out those other options, a 25U rack sounds about right given our server storage needs and seeing as it's a smaller room with a few desks in it already. Thanks for the input.