Should I get rackmounted or tower servers for in-house use?

Currently we have about 8 or so in-house servers, all of which are Dell towers. We've never needed to upgrade them in a way other than more memory or a HD swap. There’s a 10 foot wide or so rack system that everything is on (servers, network hardware etc.) and it’s taking up a fair amount of space which is pretty limited in our office.

We're going to be upgrading two of the servers (backup and dev. web). What I'm wondering about is if there's any reason I should go for rack mounted or stick with towers. We don’t have a rack to put them in and I don’t see us getting one for awhile. My thinking is that it’s worth planning now so we can change over later, but I’m not sure if it’s ok to just stack rack mounted systems on each other, if there’s a real price difference that would make towers better or even something else I'm not thinking of. Our 2 newest Dell towers can be rack mounted if we got the hardware for it I think.

Solution 1:

If your servers will be in the room with other people, I suggest getting quiet tower systems. Rack servers are designed to keep cool under extreme conditions and have fans that sound like jet engines. Even putting the servers in a cabinet won't reduce the noise to comfortable levels.

Solution 2:

Tower servers are generally lower cost. I always buy rackmountable servers regardless. Converting from tower to rack is usually very pricey ($200-$500) even directly from Dell. Tower servers also take up more room as they are different sizes most of the time. Rack servers might be longer, but their width and height are standardized. Rack servers are sometimes a bit louder especially if you get 1U units. So keep that in mind.

Solution 3:

For your current servers, there's a good chance that they're of a form factor that will fit in a rack. We've used these "rails" to slip tower servers that were the right height, which most Dell towers are, into the racks on their sides.

Rack mount servers are more efficient space wise, but you always sacrifice something -- in this case, they're usually very loud.

Solution 4:

Dell does have servers that are designed to be either towers or rackmounted, if you are really concerned about flexibility. I will warn you though, they weigh a ton, are louder than a jet engine, and look like minitanks...

Solution 5:

Looks like your main concern is space and that is one of the main benefits of using a rack to keep your servers in. You can have up to around 40 - 1U servers in about a 3x4 footprint (estimated cause I don't wanna measure our rack at the moment). You may even get more if you go with blades...It sounds like you are at a small company with 10 servers that are in the IT office with people so noise is an issue probably.

Needless to say if you are thinking of migrating your hardware to rack-mounted servers, this is going to cost the company money, and you will need upper-management to be on board with a project like this since they will only be looking at the bottom-line - how will rack-mounted servers help the company save money in the long-term? (or to quote Initech management "Is this good for the COMPANY?" :) Upper-management doesn't typically care if towers take up more space as long as there is space available, if they are quieter than a whole rack full of servers if the rack is in its own room, if they are easier to work on than towers, but they do care that towers are cheaper than rack-mounted servers...

It really depends on whether or not the company wants to make the jump to a rack or not and how good the current server hardware is at fulfilling the company's needs. IT need alone rarely drives company purchasing (or at least it shouldn't despite how cool new stuff is to us). Another factor to consider is, once you get your rack in place and fill it with servers is your cooling system going to need an upgrade as well? This will cost even more money. Do you have enough power in the room to handle a full rack? (I'd recommend building out the server room to handle a full rack at least even if you don't have enough servers to fill it up yet. The goal of most companies is to grow their business, after all).

Positive things to include when selling the rack form-factor to management are: 1) space savings 2) scalability will be easier due to #1

...actually that is probably it, all the other benefits are purely for the IT department. Rack systems are more scalable (static footprint but you can add more to the rack) so if you go through a period of rapid growth it will be much easier to expand your hardware to meet your needs. At some point I am sure, every company reaches a point at which they are at critical tower-server mass, and it just makes sense to go with racks because of the growing hardware pile - despite the upfront cost. You just need to determine if your particular company is at that point or not...You can look into other ways to reduce your hardware pile as well, such as virtualization - and you can usually implement a smaller-scale solution with free software such as ESXi or Hyper-V. I will leave you with this stupid saying I just made up - Once you go rack you never go back :)