Nice Rack!

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is Chris and for the longest time I've been in the market for a small server rack such as this one and I finally found one from monoprice so we're going to review this rack we're also going to talk about some server rack best practices that's coming right up so the number of servers that I have here my home office has been growing I've got two that I've already installed into this rack but I could for a long time I've been looking for a small rack that I could use right now these servers have just been sitting on top of a dresser with a monitor on top of that and it just you know kind of messy it doesn't look nice and so I wanted a good spot where I can have a small rack and I actually have a little closet that's kind of under the stairs so it's not really useful for anything else and I'm going to be keeping this rack underneath that closet in that in that closet underneath the stairs area and it should fit absolutely perfectly it'll keep my servers organized it'll keep them out of the way and it will keep them off the ground and yeah it should work out pretty well so this is a nine new rack on casters these are locking casters so the the ones that I have up front here actually lock only two out of the four wheels actually locked but this rack came in at two hundred and sixty three dollars on monoprice it's good solid steel construction it's a twenty inches let's see 20 yes I guess 20 inches this way by 21 and a half tall by thirty five point four inches deep and it has a weight capacity of apparently it says up to four hundred and forty pounds I mean you'd be hard-pressed to put 440 pounds into you know just a nine you rack but I tested it with 200 pounds by just lying across the top of it and that definitely supported my 200 pounds so this should be compatible with most servers that are out there and it also has these adjustable brackets in the back so that you can connect the back end of a rack mount kit please see I've got this one on the rail kit the rail kit connects right to the back here and these are just from here all the way back to the very back so that you can get your you know the rear mounting rail kits to attach to the backside of this this server rack so putting this thing together was pretty easy it took me about half an hour's start to finish to get it put together it actually took me about the same amount of time or longer just to get these this sangoma phone system 500 rail system attached attached to the server acta that was more complicated than putting the server rack itself together it didn't come with any instructions whatsoever though so it was basically I had to look at pictures on monoprice comm and sort of figure out where all of the pieces fit luckily there aren't too many pieces so that wasn't too big a deal okay so let's talk about some some rack best practices now in a previous life you know I worked on rack systems that were much bigger than this we typically use racks from CPI or Chatsworth products those were always very good racks I think we also purchased some racks directly from Dell and there's a bunch of stuff that you need to consider when you're working with racks it's a little bit different than just having computers you know sitting on the ground or sitting in a closet somewhere but really it all boils down to airflow and temperature and and things like rack spacing so the first thing that you'll notice here is that I've got one server on the very bottom and then I've got a space and then I've got a second server and again this mostly relates to an environment where you're actually in a datacenter you've got a good solid air conditioning system going on it's not going to matter in my case but I figured I would point this out they make one you blanks that can fit in between servers or in-between components in the rack and so the reason they make those blanks is so that you can have imagine that this was a you know full-size rack completely populated with servers and you had some gaps in between servers especially if you have servers that are going to be running a little bit hot you want to put a gap in between them so that it helps to dissipate some of that heat then when you put the 1u blank in the front or in the 1u blank space it's not actually going to be sucking any air through that space so the most air conditioning possible sucked into the front vents of the computer and then of course exhaust out the back speaking of exhausting out the back if you have multiple rows of server racks you want to make sure that they are but to button right exhaust to exhaust so that you've got a row of air conditioning cooling on the front sides of the servers and then two sets of roads that are exhausting directly into the back you know into like a hot row if you will if you have a really really dense server environment they even make racks that have basically an exhaust system on the rear door so you'll have a big old door it's about four or five inches thick it pulls up and from the back and the entire inside of the rear door is lined with fans that suck air into the door and then vent it up into the ceiling or you know just out of the server room somewhere so we had a bunch of those going at one point when we had a lot of dense server capacity it really really helps cut down on your air conditioning bill if you can just sort of manually get that heat right out of the server room then you don't have to worry about actually cooling down the server room as much if you do have a good air conditioning system like every server room should it's nice to have it either through the floor so when you do an under the floor air conditioning system some of the floor boards will be perforated with little holes you want to put one of those perforated boards right in front of your row of servers and if you're coming down from the top and you have vent openings you want to kind of aim those vent opening so that again it hits the front of your servers because you want all of the cool air to suck in the front and then exhaust out the back let's talk about power for a second so best practice for server room power not necessarily even rack power you see here I just have one power strip that I have zip tied to the back end of this rack but in a best practice environment especially if you have a super taller or you know full sized rack you want to have a power strip probably on each side of the rack and when you're plugging the power strips in you want to make sure that each power strip goes to its own circuit in your electrical grid and then if you have servers that have multiple PS use multiple power supplies or redundant power supplies you want to plug one of each of the power supplies into each of the power strip that's on its own circuit this way if one of the power strips goes out if the power supply one of the power supplies on the server goes out or if an entire circuit blows your server theoretically should still remain up and active and that seems pretty self-explanatory but I cannot honestly tell you how many times I've walked into a server room environment and I've seen servers that have you know redundant PS use that are both plugged into the same power strip right so that's just a big no-no at the very least even if you're on the same circuit you want to plug multiple PS use into multiple different power strips okay so finally let's talk about one of the biggest pains in the bus with a server rack system and if these little tiny screws that you get or these like these little screw systems like the square screws that sort of hook in here and there's kind of a right and a wrong way to do that so I'm going to I'm going to bring you in close here and see if I can get a close-up shot of putting these little you know rear mounted screw things into the rack itself because it can be an exercise in frustration if you've never done it before so let me show you the best way or how I do it and then then we can go from there okay so these are the little pieces that I'm referring to if you guys have ever worked at the rack I'm sure you know what I'm talking about and these basically fit on the backside of these pegs here which by the way if you ever forget where a 1u starts and stops if that's a smaller intersection so you see this is a wide intersection is a little bit wider right here a little bit wider right here and then this one's a little bit thinner well the thin one is where a 1u segment of three wholes starts and stops okay so basically you've got your little stopping ray if you guys know the actual name of this please tell me because I don't know what the actual name of it is but you basically get this in the back and then your screw goes in the front so your server closes over it and then the screw holds the server in and then you know the back here so there's two ways I put these in number one if it's easy enough I just pop it in with my fingers just sort of squeeze down on it and it pops right in there we go and then of course your screw can screw right into the front now if that doesn't work and sometimes these are not quite as forgiving as the ones that came in this kit these are probably cheap that's why they are so bendable you can just use a screwdriver so sometimes they will actually come with a special tool to do this but essentially a flathead screwdriver will do the same thing if you put in the bottom portion you stick the flat head screwdriver up and then you basically just pull it straight out there you go so that's how you can get it in with the screwdriver same thing was getting it out you can just kind of pop it down off the top and it comes right out now one other thing one last tip here is if you're going to be utilizing a power drill or a power screwdriver to get the screw in place you want to make sure that you torque down your drill to as low as you can possibly go I mean not not as low I put mine at four if anywhere four to six is probably fine on the torque but you don't want to strip your screws when holding these servers in place and honestly they don't have to be super tight they just need to be kind of in place because usually there's going to be multiple points where they're connected at least you know two or three screws upfront and then also on the backside so then when you torque it in just make sure that you keep that torque real low so that it stops it before it actually strips the screw [Applause] [Music] there you go okay so there we go there's a quick look at the nine used server rack on wheels from monoprice again I'm pretty happy with this rack I think the price was okay if you guys have any suggestions for similar racks that people can use put those down in the comments because I know that other people will find that helpful as well and I'll also put a link to this rack on monoprice in the description at below so I hope you enjoyed this video my name is Chris with crop top solutions if you did enjoy this video please give me a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this please click subscribe thank you so much for watching you [Music]

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 24,061

Keywords: monoprice, rack, server rack, rack mounting

Id: A1CB4j9Weuo

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2017