Carefully consider the physical placement of your rack server equipment and its arrangement in an array of servers. Its placement and orientation in the server room or data center is crucial to the economy of maintaining the equipment. Service access to rack-mounted systems is usually handled in the front, with cable management delegated to the rear of the rack. Accessibility to all parts is necessary though, and you should also consider whether these spatial provisions enable future expansion.
Tip: Equipment kept in server racks eventually requires servicing, and heavier equipment often needs to remain attached to the server rack during this process. To facilitate servicing, mount a pair of supportive slide rails onto which you place the equipment during installation. This will enable you to extract, inspect and maintain the equipment without disrupting service of other components or disturbing the rack server itself.
Once you acquire and install a rack server solution, you'll need to monitor, manage and maintain it for the life of the unit. Time and manpower can be effectively utilized with consolidated management software such as HP's SIM, which uses a unified infrastructure management strategy. This platform provides integrated remote support, services and tools for remote administration tasks and gives you greater administrative control over a large number of computing platforms in your server and storage infrastructure. This also further reduces cost and management complexity. HP SIM gives you a consolidated perspective of your HP infrastructure from any location at any time.
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