Understanding Your Server Cabinets
Server cabinets are units designed to hold servers, switches, monitors and other mountable hardware in a housing of a standardised format. In most cases that format is 19 inches wide which is a measurement taken from the front of the mountable unit, not the interior width of the cabinet. Thats because the rack mounted servers and other items of communications hardware are attached to the front using bolts, rather than sliding in the entire thing.
The server, or the mountable unit youre inserting into the rack mount, is measured in a slightly different way. The height of the server is measured as U, which is a basic definition of the height of one Unit. This equates to one and three quarter inches.
Server cabinets are based on the designs that used to be used to house signal switching relays in railway sidings. This is why they are still sometimes referred to as a relay rack rather than a server rack or rack mount cabinet.
The server cabinet is now widely used throughout the communications industries, for housing switches; communications relay equipment and monitoring equipment as well as data storage units.
Large server cabinets need to be cooled to ensure continued good use of the technology mounted in them. The bigger the rack, the more hardware it can fit and so the more cooling it needs to be capable of producing. Modern data centre designs have augmented the internal capabilities of server cabinets to be cooled (you can mount fan racks in there as well as servers the fan racks are measured in U as well and are 19 inches wide in normal circumstances). In a modern data centre a lot of the server cooling is done externally, by chilling the air circulating through the chamber.
This is done either by containing the air and separating cold from hot (so the cold air is either only in the server aisle, or only behind the servers, depending on layout); or by using air conditioning. Cold aisle containment is thought to be more efficient.
Server cabinets dont have to be floor mounted or even mounted within a dedicated data centre. In the case of the small business, there is an option for a single server rack to be mounted within an office area or to use wall mounted data cabinets instead. The size and type of rack you end up using is often dictated by the space available to you as well as by the data needs of your company.
Standalone server cabinets are usually acoustically dampened to reduce the ambient noise produced by working switches and servers to an acceptable level. Some soundproof cabinets may reduce external noise by as much as 18 decibels.
The server, or the mountable unit youre inserting into the rack mount, is measured in a slightly different way. The height of the server is measured as U, which is a basic definition of the height of one Unit. This equates to one and three quarter inches.
Server cabinets are based on the designs that used to be used to house signal switching relays in railway sidings. This is why they are still sometimes referred to as a relay rack rather than a server rack or rack mount cabinet.
The server cabinet is now widely used throughout the communications industries, for housing switches; communications relay equipment and monitoring equipment as well as data storage units.
Large server cabinets need to be cooled to ensure continued good use of the technology mounted in them. The bigger the rack, the more hardware it can fit and so the more cooling it needs to be capable of producing. Modern data centre designs have augmented the internal capabilities of server cabinets to be cooled (you can mount fan racks in there as well as servers the fan racks are measured in U as well and are 19 inches wide in normal circumstances). In a modern data centre a lot of the server cooling is done externally, by chilling the air circulating through the chamber.
This is done either by containing the air and separating cold from hot (so the cold air is either only in the server aisle, or only behind the servers, depending on layout); or by using air conditioning. Cold aisle containment is thought to be more efficient.
Server cabinets dont have to be floor mounted or even mounted within a dedicated data centre. In the case of the small business, there is an option for a single server rack to be mounted within an office area or to use wall mounted data cabinets instead. The size and type of rack you end up using is often dictated by the space available to you as well as by the data needs of your company.
Standalone server cabinets are usually acoustically dampened to reduce the ambient noise produced by working switches and servers to an acceptable level. Some soundproof cabinets may reduce external noise by as much as 18 decibels.
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