Rack "foorprints" at the datacenter are expensive, and you pay for 15kw per footprint whether you use it or not. it just made sense to fit it all into one. Having had this rack running at full power for a couple of weeks now, I can say the temps stay lower than our SuperMicro racks in the same row!! and the Supermicro racks can only hold 20 machines before they run out of power in the footprint.
We went through several designs with the vendor. This cable is designed to operate at the circuit rating. The wire from the PDU plug to the split is 12GA 600V and the cable from the split to the mini is 14GA 300V.
I looked into some rack cooling options, but was unable to find a solution that would provide the amount and wide coverage of airflow I needed to move air slowly and uniformly through the rack to provide effective cooling. ( I was designing this to be used with the active cooling rear doors, so I couldn't overwhelm the door with too much air or it wouldn't cool the air effectively, and would raise the ambient temp of the room). So the fans move a high volume of air through the entire cabinet (including the corners) at low velocity resulting in very effective cooling of each of the 40 shelves.
The fans are large so they move a high volume of air at a low speed, the door doesn't move is left unlatched.
Also, can you please explain your "Massive Fire risk" comment? All of the hardware installed in this rack is UL certified and all of the machines will simply shut down if they get too hot.
Yap. I really depends on the type of loading. In other words I didn't mean "servers" as in necessarily web servers just machines that handle server loads. In this case it just means constants high CPU and disk churn. So if this is a high contention test rack, running tests non-stop its hardware will experience a server type level of stress.
Sorry about the wording of my sentence. It was supposed to imply that I built a prototype cable at home to show to the cable vendors who would have to build them. Also, there was plenty of discussion about the potential of these cables to be misused, the vendor manufactured the cables to handle 15A. I have corrected my Wordpress page to reflect this discussion.
