Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Fri 7th Apr, 2006

I have a sudden craving for purple rackmount cases...

In wandering around looking for where to submit a bug about CFS to, I stumbled across the pages of Spinserver. No, it's not a daemon to allow you to run spin locks faster; these are rackmount cases where the 'back' of the motherboard - the bit with all the ports on it - are at the front. Despite it flying in the face of tradition, there's a lot to recommend this configuration:

For a start, it's a lot cooler. With the back being almost entirely comprised of large fans, you can move serious amounts of air through these cases. The 3RU cases can get up to 3 cubic metres of air per second - something I have a hard time just imagining. And, because the only cable at the back is the power cable, most of the clutter that slows air down back there is eliminated. You can even put the entire rack unit against a wall, or back to back with another, since you pretty much don't need access to the back for anything short of complete disaster.

Since all the cabling is at the front, you can do all your patching in one place. That's where the ports on your network switch are, right? You can even get rid of KVM switches by simply plugging the head monitor, keyboard and mouse cables in directly, saving a lot of extra clutter and making it bleeding obvious which machine you're working on. You get all the diagnostic lights at the front, too, so it's much more obvious when a cable isn't plugged in quite right.

And to cap it all off they're made from top-quality components right here in Australia. I want one so badly now! I wonder if they do a 2RU case that'll take two Via EPIA motherboards side-by-side...

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