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Cabinet Physical Diagrams

A physical diagram of the cabinet will show server, ancillary equipment, physical interfaces, and interconnections.

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Last updated 10 months ago

Correct cabinet layout will show some thought for weight and access requirements. You could show the U height each device is installed at. Add some notes to clarify details (for example, associating PDUs with UPS, etc).

The easiest way to do this is perhaps in Excel. Visio is also OK, but you need to put in a lot of detail to get as much semantic content as the spreadsheet below.

  1. You could identify IP ratings.

  2. How does airflow/cooling work?

  3. UPS/STS at the bottom.

  4. PDUs in banks of two for redundancy, clearly annotated or associated with a UPS or dirty power.

  5. Horizontal cable management in appropriate places.

  6. Heavy equipment low down, SAN/NAS, etc.

  7. Servers stacked in groups of whatever the cluster size is (maybe not relevant for all assignments)

  8. KVM switch, keyboard mounted c. 900mm above floor level, annotated.

  9. Network equipment at top of rack.

  10. If you are terminating fibre/copper etc., where is that located?

You might show front and back, back may only show 0U PDUs, but sometimes we use rear-mount switches.

In some cases, I ask for a remote site cabinet layout, the calculations are probably easy. In other cases, I specify a small data centre layout, this may be more complex and will almost certainly be accompanied by a calculation spreadsheet.

To specify the cabinet layout, you need to know if the UPS is in the rack or central. Then you need to decide equipment type and layout and define a pod size. For a 5-server cluster with 2*ToR switches and 2*SAN, probably c. 20U. You could have two pods per 47U cabinet.

In assignments which require a cabinet document, the most important component is the calculation sheet and notes explaining your rationale, everything else is predicated on this.