Re:Don't *need* a rack (Score 4, Insightful)

Yeah, well, sometimes you get what you pay for :(

Note that my experience comes from both working in a datacenter (a competitor to Rackspace, won't say who), and from having a home rack built out of that wire shelving. There are pros and cons to both sides.

The biggest pro, of course, to the cheap white box and wire shelving way is the cheapness factor. The problem is that this is only an advantage while you have a lot of extra space in the data center. You can only get 9 or 12 white boxes in a rack stacked vertically, you can get 42 1U servers in a single rack. 3 times the density, basically. Plus, in my experience with our legacy cheap whiteboxes, they are far more likely to have hardware failures (power supply, motherboard, etc.) than the higher class hardware (mostly IBM, some Dell and HP). Hard drives fail in everything, but the whiteboxes are a pain in the ass to take apart to replace them. The rackmount servers open right up, and everything is right there where you can get to it. Also, the nonserver motherboards and bioses that were put in the whitebox have various issues with our automated build systems (varying NICs, some supporting PXE boot, some not, different array controllers, etc). You can control some of this by buying the same parts from the same vendors, but consumer systems don't have the build stability that server oriented systems do. Even if you are buying exactly the same model, you can find components (and drivers!) changing from one revision to the next depending on where the manufacturer got the best deal.

Now, as to the home environment, like I said, I have a wire shelf rack, with a bunch of different stuff on it (Suns, PCs, Powermacs). The main reason I am probably going to buy a real rack for the new house I just bought is flexibility. You can't easily move shelves around or add shelves to one of those wire units without taking the whole thing apart. If you only have tower systems, all exactly the same height, this is probably not a big deal. You just make all the shelves the right space for the tower systems, and leave them in place. But if you have a mix of stuff, and you want to maximize your space usage, you really want to put stuff horizontal, each on a separate shelf. This is when a real rack comes into its own. There are a variety of shelves available (some that slide out, some statically mounted, etc). Adding or moving a shelf is just a matter of 4 or 6 bolts. Most server class hardware has available rackmount addons (all of my Suns do). Another factor is cable management, currently I have a mess of wires all velcroed together... good racks come with cable management built in, and it is usually fairly cheap to add to a rack afterwards even if it doesn't come with it. And note that if you shop on ebay, or can find a good local remarketer/recycler (one who buys stuff from closing companies), then rackmount hardware and even the racks can actually be cheaper than buying wire shelving brand new. My 7 foot tall wire shelving unit cost me $350 to build... I have seen full racks, with side panels and everything, for $150 or so on ebay. What kills on these things is the shipping, so finding a local remarketer or ebay seller like another poster mentioned is definitely a good idea. You could double the price of a rack with the shipping charges.