Kell Systems office server cabinets
I stumbled upon these guys a while ago in the adverts in the back of Computing Weekly magazine. They were all dressed up to look like an internal email about how someone had “discovered” this new system and how brilliant it all was. I took some notice, but not alot!
Scroll on a few years and we are removing all servers from offices and virtualising them to a central data centre. I should explore this in a longer post but, in short, we are left with a server room that contains very little more than structured cabling and switches.
Now this is the sort of space that would be good as a meeting room and, as we all know, meeting rooms are always in short supply yet we need somewhere to put the switches and ports; enter the office server cabinet.
I did some research into what Kell Systems claimed to be able to do and thought that it would easily be able to cope with the limited amount of equipment we were going to put into it. What I found was a very good product which I would happily put into any of our office environments and the rest of this blog is a mini-explore of that same product.
Quick overview
I would suggest watching the demo on YouTube as to what these things are and how they work (save me typing it out really)
Now the things I would say immediately is that the sound proofing really really does work. OK it’s not silent but it hugely reduces the amount of noise down to something like a printer ticking over in the corner. If you open the doors there is a significant change in the volume in any office you are working in so much so people stop and look!
What did we put in there?
As we moved all the servers from the office to the data centre we were left with the connectivity; switches, structured cabling and a single ESX server to run office services.
As you can see it’s mostly structure cabling, cisco switches, a UPS unit and a 2U Dell server making up most of the rack. I would say this would be a typical setup for an office of up to 100 people.
It does make everything nice and compact and there are good routes for cables coming out the back of the rack through a specially designed floor in the rack.
Sound reduction
As I said before this really has worked in our case and you have an idea of what we are actually putting in the rack (as above).
The acoustic matting is a thick foam substance which, more or less, is attached to every panel of the rack. It works pretty well and the drop in noise from shutting those front doors is remarkable!
Air flow
We don’t run anything particularly hot so it’s difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the airflow with any degree of certaintity. However the design of the airflow is such that it does give you confidence it is actually doing something!
2 rows of 12 inch fans at the back pull air through the cabinet from ducts at the top and bottom of the rack itself. These flow through the chassis and out the back through side venting ducts. This is kind of important as you would want to push these units right against the wall and, as in our case, if you put something next to it you are going to be venting hot air right on top of that unit. This also means that if you want to put the rack in amongst other cupboards you need to give it space at the back behind the others to vent hot air or space at the sides.
The picture shows the vents pushing air sideways from the fan units (each of those fan units clips on and off) and why you need to give it space at the back. It also shows the power distribution at the back and the ease of access you have.
Security
This is where I am not entirely convinced. There are options to secure the rack with a code entry on the front two doors (as per picture) but no locking mechanism round the sides/back. So you can stop the casual user from fiddling with the front of the rack but you can’t stop them taking off the sides and unplugging power round the back! Whether this is a realistic security issue within an office is a different question but it’s nevertheless not as secure as it could be.
Conclusion (would I buy another one?)
This is a great solution for an in office cabinet which needs active cooling. I like the build quality of the unit and I like the product itself. I would thoroughly recommend this for an office where the situation required it such as the centralisation of servers. Yes, I would buy one again.
Incidentally the company involved (Kell Systems - http://www.kellsystems.co.uk/) has now been bought by APC the very large UPS and server room infrastructure providers. The obviously think that the product is worth their cash.
