I want to rack 80 Mac Minis.

3

I’m at it again but this time I’m shooting for 80, and yes, I’m that crazy.  I’ll be using a 2-post relay rack with 10 single-sided shelves on one side (that’d be 9 Minis per shelf).  This means I’ll deal with the following nightmares:

  1. 80 freakin’ power bricks, power cords
  2. 80 ethernet cables and no horizontal (or vertical even!) cable management trays
  3. 80 freakin’ power bricks
  4. Power cycle requests for non-remotely-management “servers“
This is quite an evolution from the first version (on the left) and the second (right).
Mac Rack 1, Cable MessBut with 80 freakin’ power cords I’m sure to end up with something like this (on the right) but worse.  Unless convinced otherwise I’ll be using ServerTech’s Remote Power Management PDUs but the only way to get the outlet density I need is with 5 16 outlet PDUs which will eat up 10u of rack space (on the backside).

Why someone can’t make me some better way to power 80 Mac Minis is beyond me.  50 Minis draws something around 15 Amps (@110V).    Maybe I should look into powering this rack through induction?  Or revive Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower?

 

Shoot me a line if you have a better idea how to do this or want to custom make me some PDU to make my life easier.

 

Categories: Mozilla

3 responses

  1. Tristan wrote on :

    Hey mrz,

    I’d love to know about these cute little minis, why we use them and why so many of these. You mention perfs, but why do we need 80 of these? Do they add to the existing 50 minis or are we just adding 30 minis to the 50 you already mentioned?

  2. Vitorio wrote on :

    Drop a line to Mac Mini Colo and ask them how they do it so efficiently?

    http://www.macminicolo.net/facility.html doesn’t show much, but they say they had over 400 in their first quarter, so 80 should be easy.

  3. skierpage wrote on :

    Seems like this guy got rid of his power bricks and with some complicated soldering connected his Mac Minis to a 12V power supply.

    http://www.markandjo.com/markblog/?p=3