With the rapid growth of data volume, more and more enterprises have begun to realize that using and storing massive data more efficiently and safely, classifying and archiving massive data more scientifically, and managing massive data more effectively are important foundations for ensuring business continuity. More and more enterprises have begun to focus on building their own enterprise data centers.
Different enterprise sizes and business data volumes have different requirements for data center scales. How to purchase the right equipment at the right price and build a suitable data center requires procurement personnel to have a deep understanding of the company’s own needs and to have certain procurement knowledge and experience for highly professional equipment.
Compared with the investment in servers, storage and other network equipment, cabinets have always been regarded as low-value, ancillary products in IT applications, just containers for servers and other equipment, and are not taken seriously. However, low-priced cabinets are the most direct physical protection for expensive IT equipment. If we only pay attention to the IT equipment itself and ignore the IT micro-environment in which it is located, more data centers will be led to the edge of danger.
What is a cabinet? Many people regard a cabinet as a cabinet for IT equipment. A cabinet is a cabinet, but it is more than that. With the development of computer and network technology, IT facilities such as servers and network communication equipment in data centers are moving towards miniaturization, networking, and racking, which has brought new changes to the construction model of data centers. Cabinets are gradually becoming one of the protagonists in this change. For data centers, cabinets are becoming an important part of them.
Application environments that require careful examination
The racking of IT equipment has led to changes in the specifications of the cabinets. The most obvious manifestation is the reduction in the size of a single server. The height space occupied by the server is decreasing, while the depth space is increasing, so the depth requirements for the cabinet are also gradually increasing. In addition, maximizing the installation density of IT equipment has become the current development trend of rack servers. The extensive use of 1U blade servers means that a 42U cabinet can install up to 42 servers, and each server uses two (or even more) CPUs. The hard disks are also mostly in the form of internal arrays, which will release more heat during operation, resulting in a very high heat density in the cabinet. If the cooling problem of the equipment inside the cabinet is ignored, it may also cause IT equipment to fail and reduce its lifespan.
The compatibility of cabinets is also a headache for users. Nowadays, data center cabinets are equipped with equipment from different manufacturers, so the cabinets must have good compatibility. If the cabinet compatibility is not good, when upgrading IT equipment, the original cabinet may not meet the needs, and users are forced to replace the entire set of equipment in the computer room. This kind of unnecessary cost consumption is common in the early construction of computer rooms. The lack of compatibility will inevitably lead to poor scalability of the overall cabinet solution, which cannot meet the ever-changing needs of the IT industry. For users, it obviously reduces the life cycle of the system and generates excessive costs.
Cabinet Type Differences
Although cabinets all look the same, they can be broken down into several types. The most common ones are cabinets for wiring and cabinets for placing servers. Cabinets for wiring are generally used to place multiple terminal switches, so there will be a lot of network cables that need to be connected. This type of cabinet is not convenient to set up doors and looks more like a rack. Some cabinet manufacturers call this product a wiring rack; cabinets for placing servers must have doors and locks. More expensive routers and firewalls are generally placed in this type of cabinet.
Ordinary server cabinets have four cooling fans installed on the top of the cabinet, and the bottom of the cabinet is hollowed out to provide a good constant temperature environment inside the cabinet. The heat dissipation effect of the server on the top of this cabinet is very good, but the heat dissipation of the servers in the middle and lower parts is not ideal. High-end server cabinets use dense air holes on the front and back doors for ventilation and heat dissipation, and can even expand the accessories of the built-in air conditioner to distribute the cold air of the air conditioner around each server in the cabinet. This has high requirements for the materials used for the cabinet, anti-corrosion and anti-rust, and load-bearing capacity.