This is something I have been needing for some time, but kept pushing back as prices were less than inviting on the new market, and bulky and heavy as server racks are, even nicely priced used ones can get really expensive once shipping gets factored in.

But then, one day, while browsing an "ebay style" national site, I find this apparently pristine 42U tall, 19" wide Dell server rack pretty close to me, close enough to drive there with my trailer at any rate. A little negotiating later and off I go to grab my new rack, only to be confronted with the age old "while you are here, let me show you what else I have on sale" pitch, for which I am a sucker, obviously.

The rack, along with a few things installed haphazardly

It is a lovely rack, and with it I ended up grabbing a couple of servers, both with rail kits and two redundant PSUs which led me to believe I could always reuse at the very least the case and the PSUs.

One of the servers, a Dell PowerEdge 2900 that presents itself as a 5U high behemoth and weighs just enough to make me look ridiculous trying to move it around, and the other, a Dell PowerEdge 1950, a 1U and much more manoeuvrable piece of kit, though by no means light. In both cases using the servers "as is" is not part of my plan, basically due to their age. I mean, if they are working fine I could easily find a use for them, but power usage for this generation of servers is... not easy to justify.

The double Xeon X5365 of the 1950, along with the 32GB of DDR2 Fully Buffered memory show a cool ~300W idle (I mean, BIOS idle, no disk installed) power usage, although I bet a good portion is the system fans responsibility, those things spin loudly!

The 2900 has a lower powered CPU pair and less RAM, but still hovers quite close to the 1950's figure.

I did end up having to buy a couple of used power supplies for this server, both units supplied with it were dead on arrival, and the seller did propose we could undo the deal on that one, but gave me another option, taking one more 1950 with me, one he knew also had both PSUs dead and thus would likely not be sold anyway. I bet you can guess my decision there...

A pretty NAS, two PowerEdge 1950's, and so much empty space!

I will test everything is working on the servers, other than the known dead PSUs, gut all of them and try to sell the remains on ebay. The stuff I will try to reuse will almost certainly warrant their own journal entry.

So, I have a rack and a bunch of projects for it, which could be done without it as I have in the past by way of desktop machines here, there and everywhere, but I feel everyone's sanity will get a boost from the eventual consolidation. And for one particular project we are working on I'll need to get a lot of storage space split across two locations, so at least my home office can now accommodate some of it.

I already have a rack mountable UPS, a bit on the small side but it will get us started, a QNAP NAS that I bought cheap "for parts" and got working and so off we go, trying to build this rack up incrementally, unsure of best practices or even some basic ones, if I'm honest. I have worked on many racked servers but was never the one to handle the server rack installation or maintenance!