For a variety of reasons the main server room for the firm I support is located in an electrical “closet” in the headquarters building’s basement. There is no AC, only a powerful blower to introduce fresh air to the small space. This has meant that the servers have always been sucking in very warm air, frequently very dusty, and sometimes literally full of small flying bugs.
To make things a little stranger there is an actual properly built server room also in the basement. However, it is a very large room that was obviously set up for the oil company that used to occupy the building in the 1990′s. Currently this “server room” is used for filing storage for client discovery and up until a few months ago the room was quite full of file boxes. I gave my IT Admin the job of figuring out how we could fit in a 4-post server rack inside this room without losing any storage space for the files. Seems difficult since the room was full but when I looked at the way things were in there it seemed like there was a lot of wasted space.
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- The raised floor panels removed to expose the under-floor electrical wiring.
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- That’s me surveying where to put the new rack exactly.
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- That’s my IT Admin putting it together.
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- Almost done.
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- Adding a cable guide flange.
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- Finishing the last details.
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- Set up and in place.
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- All done with the floor panels back in place.
My IT Admin got a copy of Google 3D Sketchup so that he could model the space and all the shelves in it and see what was possible. It turns out that by reconfiguring the space we could fit the server rack in the back and the filing department would actually gain additional storage space. Win win.
Today we set up the new 4-post rack from racksolutions.com and just need the guy to come and bolt it to the cement which is underneath the flooring. The real work will come when we pull the cat. 6 ethernet between the existing server room, where the network patch panels are, and the new rack. 12 x 100 feet of cables will be fairly heavy I suspect.