[5515] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: More hardware design (was Re: GigaRouter)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Avi Freedman)
Mon Oct 21 18:37:28 1996
From: Avi Freedman <freedman@netaxs.com>
To: alexis@panix.com (Alexis Rosen)
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 09:11:04 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199610211226.IAA15124@panix.com> from "Alexis Rosen" at Oct 21, 96 08:26:11 am
Au contriare, mon frere.
> [Figured it was about time to change the subject line...]
>
> Speaking of hardware design, I've got a few misc. questions and comments.
> These are geared towards building servers for remote use that are *not*
> routers, but rather light- to medium-load webservers and the like.
>
> Does anyone know of a *small* rackmount case for PCs? By this I mean one
> that doesn't chew up quite so much vertical room as the usual boxes.
Yes, look in computer shopper. There are some short rack-mount PCs.
I'm trying to get pricing on them now. And Crystal makes dream rackmounts;
4 across, 8 down in a 7' x 19" rack. But I suspect they're hideously
expensive. They use passive backplanes :(
They refused to even give me a price on just "how much for the case,
power supply, backplane, and processor card w/ no cpu or memory"?
I explained that we had to decide on a standard now for colo customers,
that people walk in with 3' high tower cases and we go "nonononono".
(Those that don't accept our advise and get Suns).
> One of the annoying problems using an intel box instead of a sun is that
> there's no real console. If it dies, the only way to kick it remotely is
> with a remote-control power switch. These are expensive and unwieldy, not
> mounting nicely in racks.
I think I told you about these :)
$500 or so from Black Box, 15 or 20amps across the whole switch, but it's
code-activated and has 8 outlets. I guess you'd probably plug it into a
terminal server port. I looked at x.10 systems, but 3 digits of security
on the dtmf-parsing security does not cut it.
> Lastly, I've seen this really neat rackmount chassis from Multitech. It's
> got 22 ISA slots, severable into up to 9 parts, and enough drive bays to
> actually run 9 separate servers. If you're looking for maximal density it
> seems like a good bet. The only problem I can see is that you'll need CPUs
> with both SCSI and viseo on board (thus my first question) unless you're
> willing to run on IDE drives. I figure that for light or medium-use servers,
> ethernet over ISA should be fine.
Roughly how much?
> /a
Avi
