Small/Portable/Half Height Enclosed Server Cabinet?

Joined
Jul 9, 2001
Messages
896
I'm looking for some sort of small/portable/half height enclosed server cabinet I can put in my home office. I'm going to have something like 80 drops scattered throughout our new house we're building, regarding network and security, so I was thinking of going with something like this:

https://www.tripplite.com/18U-SmartRack-Deep-Rack-Enclosure-Cabinet~SR18UB

It's about $600 or so. This would go in my office, so I'm trying to avoid something wall mounted.

Is that a decent rack? Or is there something better? I don't want something that is any larger than that, but if there is something better quality or more sound proof, I'm all ears. Something that is between 16U and 20U would probably be perfect. I'd like for it to be enclosed, and not an open rack.

I'd be putting two 48 port patch panels, and two 48 port switches in it. I've budgeted up to $1,000 for the cabinet itself, but I'm willing to spend much less than that. I can't really find anything besides that Tripp Lite that matches what I'm looking for...but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.

Is that Tripp Lite cabinet deep enough for what I want to do? What depth should I be looking for on other cabinets?
 
How many U of equipment are you planning on having in the rack? 18U seems like a lot of wasted space for two switches and two patch panels.

I know you said you didn't want wall mount, but wall mounts are some of the best to keep these out of the way, especially with 80+ drops of networking cables.

These TrippLite cabinets are great, I've used the open rack kind and the enclosure kind. You will hardly get any soundproofing with these.

If switches are the longest piece of equipment, then you want at least switch depth on the rack/enclosure. For TrippLite, switch depth is 16.5 inches.
 
Depending on what you are looking for they can be quite expensive. We use the XRackPros at work: http://www.xrackpro.com/v/vspfiles/products.htm. They are really expensive, but they are super quite and seem to provide enough cooling for our needs.

A word of caution on some of these, it really depends how much you are running in the racks and how much heat they put off. Some of the racks may not provide enough cooling if you are running fully loaded systems. That being said, we have been using the XRackPros with out superservers and for the most part it has worked. For reference superservers have quad Xeon processors with 4 Titan XP cards in them, and they take up about 5U. We have 1 superserver, 2 switches (Cisco and Mellanox), a 2U Dell VM server, 2 4U APC backup units, and a pull out KVM in our XRackPro 25U enclosure.

EDIT: Note, most of the popular UPS brands also make Racks (APC, Tripplite, etc). I have used both APC and Tripplite racks and they have been decent. I believe you can get Wheels for both Tripp Lite and APC racks. In fact, if you call them, they should be able to size the racks, UPS, Surge, etc and perhaps give you a discount on the whole setup.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top