Hi all I'm looking for a little help in naming my most recent mod before I start posting in the project logs about it. I'm also open to any suggestions about any neat stuff to cram into the rack, but already have quite a few ideas. So far I have no clue about the name, but lets start with a quick description of the project. Its basically going to be a 19" rack mount server farm. But with a few differences. All the cases are custom build from 19" rackmount equipment cases, the rack itself is built from scratch and the contents of the rack aren't quite what you get off the shelf. My plans so far are for 2 fileservers running mini-itx boards. They each have 8 hard disks in raid 5 and are fanless. The boards im planning on are passively cooled, so i'm just concentrating on cooling the hard disks. These will be water cooled with the racks cooling system. This is basically a high capacity water cooling system that is piped round everywhere in the rack that needs it. This way I can make the whole rack with only 3 fans, now that's gonna be quiet! Also in the rack i'm building in an uninteruptable power supply, lots of independent switches for seperate LAN's, 2 wireless AP's (1 for public use and 1 more secure), gigabit lan connecting all the servers, voip to standard phone adapters and a rather beefy network control server that will also double as webserver and pbx. To top it all off, I'm planning on wiring the whole thing to communicate and be controlled via custom hardware linking to the main network control box. This will be able to individually switch on/off 6 networking devices, the 2 fileservers, the rack lighting, the front displays and monitor the status of the UPS so that it knows when stuff needs to be shut down to extend remaining battery life and safely shut down servers to protect hard disks. Im planning on some lighting for the case, but am still undecided on what to put in where. I'm going to keep the front pretty simple, just a few white LED's for various status lights and a blue/white LCD panel with control buttons that I can use to view information about any of the servers in the rack. From what I have so far the design is looking very, erm, black! The shell of the rack is all black and so is the front panels of all the rackmount cases. So apart from some lighting and some LED's I'm kinda stuck for inspiration. The main idea of this project is function not fashion, but I still want it to look good, so any ideas are welcome. At the moment the piccy's of the rack so far are on a hard disk sat on top of the rack itself (useful eh! but i was using it to measure up and plan spacing inside the fileservers) so I can't post pictures right now. Will try and get some up tomorrow so you can see what its looking like so far. So, lemme know what you think!
