I am looking to purchase all new server cabinets for my Data Center. I've looked at Xmark, APC, Rittal and Chatworths. Does anyone have experience with any of those. Does anyone have any recommendations on those or any others.
chayes, I bought some great racks for dirt cheap. They had 80 and I bought 30. $300 and they were brand new. Email me if you are interested and I can hook you up with the guy that sold them to us. tom.nats@redrocksdatacenter.com
Your choice depends on your needs. I like strong, flexible-use cabinets with good interior cabling space that can be customized easily with snap-in accessories and can house multi-vendor equipment. I find APC cabinets offer these features at a reasonable price (although not so cheap as the above offer ). I have also used Dell and Black Box cabinets, but have found the APCs to offer better features. It may be a local pheonomenon, but the APC racks are well packaged for shipping, so that they consistently arrive undamaged. Also, the trucking company calls me when they're coming and send a truck equipped with a lift-gate, which saves us lots of time.
I am going to put another vote in for APC cabinets. I spec these out for customers due to the ability to mount virtually any brand of servers and have the ability to natively mount the 0u PDUs without having to customize the strips or the cabinets. I am doing an install at a switch and data location with the blue great lakes cabinets and am having a crazy time trying to get these strips to mount!
It all comes down to requirements. What your requirements are will dictate the rack that you need. All my customers require 0u PDUs so I enjoy the 0effort installation.
We recently installed about 100 Rittal TS-8 racks. They are extremely flexible and the cable management is absolutely beautiful when baying the racks together. They cost me about 1,100 bucks through Anixter. I also use 0u power strips and find (please don't laugh...it actually works extremely well and very easy to replace if needed) 4 or 5 zip-ties attach power strips very securely.
I know very good co in Honkong Avanix. We sell them together with Rittal, Rittal is extremely expensive, Avanix racks are of very high quality and very low price. The outlets we sell from Ratio Niederland
Well my first question back would be... is this data center, or part of a data center, for a single exclusive customer/your organization or is it going to be leased out like a co-location?
Because if its going to be leased then I personally would not go with APC racks or other racks that would restrict or limit the type of devices used within the rack in any way. APC, from my experience, really only works well with APC brand PDU's and other APC brand rack gear... And not everyone likes that
However if its exclusive and you don't mind paying the extra penny for some APC brand equipment, I would vote for APC as well. When done right, they just work great. Period.