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I was thinking 1U because I don't need a lot of disk and it gives me more options about how many I can put in each cage. What kind of power limitations have yo

I was thinking 1U because I don't need a lot of disk and it gives me more options about how many I can put in each cage. What kind of power limitations have you run into? As for the disk, I just don't have a lot to store.

philjr 18y ago
Normally there is a power threshold measured in Kilowatts or amps on your cabinet. Amps is generally easier to work with. 16A or 32A would be pretty standard. Really, you need to ask your colo facility. Be careful with a 32 amp A & B feed if you're using them for redundancy. Ideally you don't want to overload the A or B feed if one of them is down. The advice given to you regarding Dell servers is pretty good. They also have a power estimator on their website which you can download which give really good indicators as to what your power usage might be. Basically, the chances are you wouldn't be able to pack 42 1u servers into a 42U cab and power is becoming more and more of an issue. Extra note: newer generation dell servers are much less hungry than the old ones. The PE 2950's are great 2U machines, easy to work with and I'd vote for them over the equivalent 1U form factor 1950s from my experience.
johnm 18y ago
If you don't need to cram a lot of boxes into a tight space then 2U will usually give you better airflow and cooling. Also, when those on-motherboard NICs die, you can more easily/cheaply add additional NIC cards to the 2U boxes. In terms of power, that's actually the main limitation in most colo's these days. Some colos are down at 15 amps per rack, many seem to be in the 20 amps per rack, and some you can get up to 30 but you will pay for that one way or another. Even at 30 amps per rack, for the kind of machines that you're talking about you are still likely to be less than about 20 machines per rack. I just spec'd a build out of the same horsepower & ram but with more juice for e.g., FC cards to a SAN and the safe limit was 16 machines in a 30 amps per rack colo and 8 machines in a 15 amps per rack colo. Shopping around for power information can be tricky because some of the colos like to play marketing games to get you to think there price is better than others but the power charges can eat you alive if you need more than what they allocate in their base charges.

philjr 18y ago

Normally there is a power threshold measured in Kilowatts or amps on your cabinet. Amps is generally easier to work with. 16A or 32A would be pretty standard. Really, you need to ask your colo facility. Be careful with a 32 amp A & B feed if you're using them for redundancy. Ideally you don't want to overload the A or B feed if one of them is down. The advice given to you regarding Dell servers is pretty good. They also have a power estimator on their website which you can download which give really good indicators as to what your power usage might be. Basically, the chances are you wouldn't be able to pack 42 1u servers into a 42U cab and power is becoming more and more of an issue. Extra note: newer generation dell servers are much less hungry than the old ones. The PE 2950's are great 2U machines, easy to work with and I'd vote for them over the equivalent 1U form factor 1950s from my experience.

johnm 18y ago

If you don't need to cram a lot of boxes into a tight space then 2U will usually give you better airflow and cooling. Also, when those on-motherboard NICs die, you can more easily/cheaply add additional NIC cards to the 2U boxes. In terms of power, that's actually the main limitation in most colo's these days. Some colos are down at 15 amps per rack, many seem to be in the 20 amps per rack, and some you can get up to 30 but you will pay for that one way or another. Even at 30 amps per rack, for the kind of machines that you're talking about you are still likely to be less than about 20 machines per rack. I just spec'd a build out of the same horsepower & ram but with more juice for e.g., FC cards to a SAN and the safe limit was 16 machines in a 30 amps per rack colo and 8 machines in a 15 amps per rack colo. Shopping around for power information can be tricky because some of the colos like to play marketing games to get you to think there price is better than others but the power charges can eat you alive if you need more than what they allocate in their base charges.