Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis
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Hi Guys,
I have a client that's moving into a new building. The IT closet was supposed to be large enough to house a proper 4 post rack, but now it looks like things have been downsized considerably and I now have to look at wall mounting the R640. Historically I always use 4 post racks with Dell's rack rails so I'm a little out of my element and I'm not seeing a lot of people talking about vertically mounting these servers.
I've been looking at two different racks at racksolutions.com:
The problem is...neither one of these solutions show up as compatible with Dell's servers. Has anyone wall mounted of these servers before? Can I just use some cage nuts/m16 screws the the generic bracket (option 2)? I just know that the front fascia is designed for Dell's rails - don't recall if there is space for screws on either side.
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From the first link - "The wall mount server rack vertical is compatible with most OEM slide rails: Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, Sun, Intel, Cisco, Juniper and 3Com. This wall mount data rack is compatible with round hole, threaded hole and square hole equipment and slides."
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Hi Guys,
I have a client that's moving into a new building. The IT closet was supposed to be large enough to house a proper 4 post rack, but now it looks like things have been downsized considerably and I now have to look at wall mounting the R640. Historically I always use 4 post racks with Dell's rack rails so I'm a little out of my element and I'm not seeing a lot of people talking about vertically mounting these servers.
I've been looking at two different racks at racksolutions.com:
The problem is...neither one of these solutions show up as compatible with Dell's servers. Has anyone wall mounted of these servers before? Can I just use some cage nuts/m16 screws the the generic bracket (option 2)? I just know that the front fascia is designed for Dell's rails - don't recall if there is space for screws on either side.
Sorry but I think you can dismiss the entire idea. Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling. The racks you're been looking at are switch racks. They can't handle the weight of a server.
Look for hosting the servers in a colo. Or move to other smaller servers, like Dell tower servers.
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So get rails for your server attached and then attach the entire unit to the wall.
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@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Hi Guys,
I have a client that's moving into a new building. The IT closet was supposed to be large enough to house a proper 4 post rack, but now it looks like things have been downsized considerably and I now have to look at wall mounting the R640. Historically I always use 4 post racks with Dell's rack rails so I'm a little out of my element and I'm not seeing a lot of people talking about vertically mounting these servers.
I've been looking at two different racks at racksolutions.com:
The problem is...neither one of these solutions show up as compatible with Dell's servers. Has anyone wall mounted of these servers before? Can I just use some cage nuts/m16 screws the the generic bracket (option 2)? I just know that the front fascia is designed for Dell's rails - don't recall if there is space for screws on either side.
Sorry but I think you can dismiss the entire idea. Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling. The racks you're been looking at are switch racks. They can't handle the weight of a server.
Look for hosting the servers in a colo. Or move to other smaller servers, like Dell tower servers.
Also to add insult to injury, the wall also need to be able to handle the weight.
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@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Also to add insult to injury, the wall also need to be able to handle the weight.
An R640 is a 1U server, we're talking maybe 50 lbs at most. This attached to a stud by just 2 wood screws would hold up just fine.
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@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Sorry but I think you can dismiss the entire idea. Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling.
And cars are meant to be driven from the backseat.
@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
The racks you're been looking at are switch racks.
Did you even read the product descriptions?
@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
They can't handle the weight of a server.
See my previous comment.
@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Look for hosting the servers in a colo. Or move to other smaller servers, like Dell tower servers.
Colocating may not be a viable cost option for the customer and tower servers often way more than a rack server
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@frodooftheshire if I had to mount a server to a wall, I would mount it horizontal so I could get access to the drive bays and cabling on the back of the server with relative ease.
Rather than vertically, which could make it difficult to get to the front or rear of the server.
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@Pete-S Actually these racks are meant to hold servers - I was looking at the 3U model (in case we wanted to mount anything else down the road) and it's rated to hold over 100 lbs....and the R640 is 48 lbs so I should be more than fine.
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@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
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@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling.
WTF does the orientation have to do with it? Cooling is handled by the fans forcing air to move in a designed direction. In the front and out the back. The orientation of the server means jack shit.
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The new servers have lever clips that work with square holes and rails. You won't find any adapter to make this work. (If you do, let me know.)
Make sure the steel frame of the server wraps around and is inside the ears. You'll know, the ears will feel like they will hold a MAC truck if the steel chassis goes into them. They will feel very weak if not.
Make sure the rack you are considering will take the weight of the server. At least 100lbs.
Get a two U rack.
Mount the server in the closest U to the wall.
Here is where your imaginations has to work. You need to make sure the server doesn't move around. You can place cage nuts in the next square hole, or you can use what ever you want to keep the server from jumping off the rack. The rack you linked to with the cover is nice because the server can't escape without removing the cover.
Cooling: IF the room is climate controlled, and IF your server load is "normal" you will not have a cooling issue. If, however your load is high and your fans are always screaming, you MAY have a cooling issue that might not exist if mounted horizontally. But I doubt it.
We do this all the time, never had an issue.
YMMV.
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@JasGot said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Cooling: IF the room is climate controlled, and IF your server load is "normal" you will not have a cooling issue. If, however your load is high and your fans are always screaming, you MAY have a cooling issue that might not exist if mounted horizontally
As Jared said, the orientation of the server doesn't matter. The server is designed to move air from the front to the back.
Not from top to bottom, left to right or any other orientation.
If the room is stupidly hot and the server was horizontal you'd still possibly encounter issues.
And in all reality, servers do just fine so long as you can avoid massive swings in temperature. Even if the temp seems "hot".
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The reason people say that you need to avoid high temps is because you increase the chances of dew developing on the server or inside the room once the temp comes back down.
And since most people don't want to work in sweat-shop server rooms, people tend to say keep it around "room temp". AC is a value-add that often times isn't required.
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@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling.
WTF does the orientation have to do with it? Cooling is handled by the fans forcing air to move in a designed direction. In the front and out the back. The orientation of the server means jack shit.
Ah, good to know.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@Pete-S Actually these racks are meant to hold servers - I was looking at the 3U model (in case we wanted to mount anything else down the road) and it's rated to hold over 100 lbs....and the R640 is 48 lbs so I should be more than fine.
Yeah, I see that now. I thought they looked like the wall mounted rack brackets that are made for switches and network gear.
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@DustinB3403 said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Colocating may not be a viable cost option for the customer and tower servers often way more than a rack server
Are you saying rack servers are cheaper than tower servers?
From what I can see Dell's lowest cost servers are always tower servers - T40, T140 etc.I actually saw one place sell Dell T40 servers for $250 (Xeon 4 core CPU, 8GB ECC RAM and a 1TB drive), otherwise they're around $400.
The cheapest rack server with the same config is $1100 (R240).
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
This should work fine as long as your server is under 105lbs. It should be as a Dell R640 is about 49lbs (but it does vary.)
This definitely says that it's compatible as it's labeled as compatible with all 19" rack compatible devices, which the R640 certainly is. We've done this mount style some and it works great. Remember you can't do front to back cooling, it's bottom to top so the "face" of the server always has to be down. This normally improves cooling over front to back but is obviously otherwise super inconvenient.
In a single server environment, this is how I prefer to mount servers because it takes up so much less room and tends to make most things easier (but it makes accessing drives harder.) With SSDs, this is definitely the way to go. Especially with a 1U.
Very easy, very simple.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
But internal parts are a shutdown anyway. so who really cares if you need a few extra minutes.
