[email protected] wrote: > We're starting to get a lot more heavy equipment (e.g. blade chassis, > storage nodes) that needs to be racked, which has increased our risk for > personal injury or equipment damage. There's a variety of "server lift" > products I've found, but I'm wondering if anyone has personal experience > with one that they'd be willing to share. > > Thanks, > > Skylar > I'm going to make 2 points, one possibly surprising, one not. (or both)
1) server lifts are a huge waste of money. These people are gouging you for it saying "server" on it. They cost 4X as much. 2) we got a normal counter-weight forklift from PrestoLift (http://www.prestolifts.com/). This is a great product. It does *not* have spreaders that will get in your way and allows you to take the forks all the way up to the rack and even into it if you are installing something with rails. I used our counter-weight presto lift to install 12 Sun x4500 servers (fully loaded, of course), all by myself. On the down side, the counterweight lift is REALLY HEAVY itself and has a lot of rolling inertia. But, we went overkill with 1000 lbs of counterweigh. In retrospec, I believe 600 should be fine for most applications, but you can do the torque calculations based upon center of mass and load yourself to see what is appropriate plus some safety margin. Also, we got the outfit that sold us the lift (ask for a reseller near you) to modify it so that it would fit through doorways. They cut about 8" off the top of the lift and put on a new header bar and color matched it for us. Lifts with spreaders are a lot lighter and easier to push, but also not nearly as flexible to get things just where you want. and you can only get them as close to the rack as the spreader unless you go in sideways, in which case you can't use the lift to help you push the server into the rails. Sometimes this is ok. We saved about 75% and are happy with our solution. It's manual push but hydraulic lift. The battery is replaceable at Napa (as I've had to do once) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
