On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 01:56:11PM +0100, Ed Butler wrote: > I hate the concept - no way to make a DC look worse more quickly than > having assorted racks. If it's a dedicated cage we would consider it, but > otherwise not a chance. > > I suspect many DCs won't allow you for this reason. Also it's a lot more > faff to have individual customers bringing in their own racks one at a > time, rather than a contractor doing a job lot.
Yes, depends on the racks and what you want to do with it. This reminds me of new build tiny flats that, when you see the show home, all the furniture seems to fit, but when you actually try to move your own furniture in, your standard sized bed won't fit in the bedroom! (Then you find out they had special custom made pixie-sized bed made to give the illusion that the bedrooms are sized fit for purpose!) Some of the racks you get by default are awful, with no space for decent cable management, or not deep enough, many with inadequate ventilation. Some of them are so cheap and nasty they bend with weight, have nasty sharp bits to slice your hands apart, door frame width so narrow you have to take the door off to get standard 19" kit in and out of the rack.. awful things. If you are present in a number of sites and you have at least 4 different sizes of rack made by 6 different manufacturers, then this can turn what should be a straightforward project in to a nightmare, when you have to check that the kit you need to install will fit in to every rack, stock 4 different kinds of shelf, 2 sizes of rails, 3 types of locks and keys incompatible with existing locks, and have different spec PDUs everywhere because one size won't fit all. Why some DCs think a tiny rack with massive vertical PDUs that block access to screw in the back of the equipment is suitable, god only knows. I think... have some of them ever *actually* tried to build a PoP in one of their racks? Recently? Or did they just try it with those old beige 3U servers in 1995, and a couple of patch panels? Some of them even want to charge for putting this not-fit-for-purpose nonsense right! "Oh well, you CAN have have a different PDU to this *clearly not suitable* one designed for a wider rack, that won't actually fit in the rack *with* your servers, but it'll cost you, and we'll charge you remote hands for swapping it! Very frequently I've seen PDUs just loose or cable tied in a rack because they won't fit, and/or the DC insists on having them. It complicates projects across multiples sites no end and prevents coming up with a very uniform build. If DCs don't want customers wanting to supply their own racks, don't supply cheap nasty ones by default, put in decent racks that don't have crappy PDU, standard locks that everybody can get keys to, impossible to source accessories, with decent cable management space, that are deep and wide enough for more than just a couple of servers. So yes.. getting racks in might be a bit of short term pain and may not have that "marketing department pleasing" look of a nice row of racks all the same type, but definitely better to the long term repeated problems that having a bunch of different spec racks causes. This situation is slowly improving as newer areas get fitted out or refurbished, but still a few sites are not putting enough thought in to what their customers actually need what they need to physically install. R.
