19 inch rack - thoughts?

iamme4eva

I've just moved house, and in my old house I had a 42U 19" rack with all of my networking equipment in it (4 x DL360 G2 servers, and a whole bunch of Cisco routers and switches). It was a horrible ugly thing, which I got for free, but it didn't matter because it was in a cupboard and out of site.

In the new house, the rack has to be more visible - it's going in a spare bedroom. Long story short, for various reasons, the rack had to go.

So now I need something new to mount my kit on, that looks tidy enough to be in the house. I reckon I need about 24U of space.

I was looking at the Skeletek racks a few weeks back, because they look pretty tidy and fairly compact. I couldn't see a valid UK distributor though, and they seemed really expensive!

I found a company on ebay in the UK who makes wooden 19 inch racks for DJ equipment. An example is 12u 19 inch Angled Rack Unit - Recording Radio Audio Studio AV Producer SMP12A | eBay......you can click through to their shop for more of their stuff.

I quite liked the look of this, as it fits nicely in with my wooden desk and wouldn't look ridiculously out of place. I'd probably have to get in touch with them to get something custom made though, because for the servers I'd need something that was 4 post.

Anybody ever used anything like this, or have any more suggestions / ideas?

Cheers.

FloOz

I can vouch for the skeletek rack since it has been the only rack I have ever owned. However if you are trying to have your rack "blend" in with its surroundings and not stick out too much I would go with the rack you linked.

LarryDaMan

Oh, 19 inch equipment rack. Nothing to see here.

Yes, work is slow today.

colby_ar

Not cheap, but I use Black Box for all of my racks. I believe they have UK distributors.

odysseyelite

Skeletek is what I have, and its the best.

Nytrocide

Another Skeletek user here...would never use anything else now. Used to have a generic rack from Amazon prior, and Skeletek is amazing and just has that solid quality.

iamme4eva

Thanks for your feedback. Looks like I need to find a Skeletek one...if I can find them in the UK!

I'm a bit concerned about the wood taking the weight - the servers are pretty heavy, and the combined weight of the switches and routers isn't exactly light.