In short. Before buying a rack server, prepare the room against five points: a floor-standing rack at least 1000 mm deep (1100 to 1200 mm with storage), with at least a third of the units left free; a dedicated power line on its own breaker, two PDUs and an online UPS giving 10 to 20 minutes of runtime; cooling sized 25 to 30 % above the IT load, with two air conditioners rotated weekly for the Tashkent summer; a dedicated windowless room, because a rack server is far too loud for an office; and a configured iLO or iDRAC on its own VLAN, with the licence bought together with the server.
The scenario repeats every year. A company sizes the server carefully by processors, memory and drives, pays the invoice, takes delivery — and only then discovers there is nowhere to put the machine. There is no rack, the existing telecom cabinet is too shallow and the 2U server will not fit. There is one socket, shared with the kettle in the next room. The server ends up on a desk with the lid off and a desk fan next to it for a month, which is not infrastructure but a prepared outage.
A server is not a larger desktop PC. Before signing the invoice, work through five engineering questions: where it will stand, how it will be powered, how it will be cooled, where the noise will go and how the machine will be managed remotely. The figures below are ranges; exact values depend on the configuration and come from the model specification.
The room and the rack
The first and most annoying mistake is cabinet depth. Wall-mounted telecom cabinets 450 to 600 mm deep are designed for patch panels and switches, while the chassis of a dual-socket 2U rack server is considerably longer. Servers need floor-standing racks from 1000 mm deep, and from 1100 to 1200 mm if storage and organised cabling are planned. The width is the standard 19 inches, but check the mounting profile type: square holes need cage nuts, threaded round holes need their own fixings, and the rails must match.
Count units with headroom. One unit is 44.45 mm of height. A minimum set includes the server (1U or 2U), a UPS (2 to 3U), a switch, a patch panel, cable managers and a PDU — in practice 10 to 12U at the start. Choose the rack so that at least a third of the space remains free after installation: within three years a second server, a disk shelf or a firewall almost always arrives.
The third point is weight and installation. A 2U server with a full set of drives weighs tens of kilograms, an online UPS as much or more, and a populated rack easily passes several hundred kilograms. Check the floor loading, doorway widths and the lift along the delivery route. Heavy equipment goes into the lower units; tall racks need floor anchors or anti-tip supports. The server mounts on the telescopic rails from its kit rather than sitting on a shelf: rails let you slide the machine out for service without dismantling half the rack.
Power
Power supply rating is not consumption. A server with two 800 W supplies does not draw 1600 W: the second unit is redundant, and the real load depends on the number of processors, memory modules, drives and any GPU. Use the vendor's power calculator for your build and budget the peak figure rather than the average.
| What to count | How to count it |
|---|---|
| Server | from the vendor configurator, with headroom for more drives and memory |
| Network equipment | rated draw of the switch and firewall; PoE counted separately |
| Storage and disk shelves | peak draw at spin-up exceeds the running figure |
| Headroom | at least 20 to 30 % above the total, or expansion means replacing the UPS |
Redundant power supplies only mean something when they are fed from different lines: two cables into one extension strip is supply redundancy, not power redundancy. The correct arrangement is two PDUs in the rack, each on its own feed. The server room takes a dedicated line from the distribution board with its own breaker and no general-purpose sockets on that circuit: a heater or a kettle will trip it sooner or later.
A server UPS must be double conversion (online); line-interactive units are not suitable here. Remember the difference between volt-amperes and watts: the usable figure in watts is always lower than the VA rating, and sizing is done in watts. The job of a UPS in an office server room is not to survive a multi-hour outage but to allow a clean shutdown: 10 to 20 minutes of runtime at full load is the usual budget. If services must run through the whole outage, that is a diesel generator.
Earthing deserves its own line. The rack and equipment chassis go to a proper earth loop; an "earth" screwed to a radiator is not earthing. A poor loop causes mains interference, unexplained memory errors and risk to people and hardware.
Cooling
The rule is simple: essentially all consumed power becomes heat. If a rack draws 2 kW from the mains, roughly 2 kW of heat enters the room and the air conditioning has to remove it, plus heat gain through walls and windows — so cooling capacity is sized about 25 to 30 % above the IT load.
Organise the airflow. A rack server takes cold air at the front and exhausts hot air at the back, which is the whole principle of cold and hot aisles. The rack must not stand with its back against a wall, and one device's exhaust must not reach another's intake. Empty units get blanking panels: otherwise hot air returns to the intake through the gaps and temperatures rise even with the air conditioning working.
Summer is a subject of its own in Tashkent. Prolonged heat pushes domestic split systems to their limit: an outdoor unit on the sunny side loses efficiency, the compressor trips into protection and the server room overheats within hours. The practical answer is two air conditioners, each able to carry the load alone, rotated weekly: that is both redundancy and reduced wear. Year-round operation also needs a low-ambient kit for starting in cold weather.
Dust is the second local factor. It clogs filters, settles on heatsinks and fan blades, fans spin up, noise rises and processors throttle. Budget for filtration on the supply air, positive room pressure and a cleaning schedule. Spare server fans and heatsinks are worth keeping on the shelf: a fan is a consumable and lives less than its rated life in a hot climate, while other components are matched to the specific platform. And install temperature and humidity sensors with alerting (40 to 60 % relative humidity is the recommended range): overheating should be reported by monitoring, not by users.
Noise and placement
Rack servers are designed for a machine room, not an open-plan office. Small-diameter fans compensate for size with revolutions, and at start-up, under high load or with a warm intake the machine is loud enough to make working beside it impossible. That is why a rack server does not go into an office or the corner of an open-plan floor — not for noise, not for security, not for dust.
If there is no dedicated room and none is coming, a tower server is the honest answer: large chassis fans at low revolutions and big heatsinks are noticeably more comfortable, and the machine can live in a utility room or a sound-insulated cabinet. Many tower models offer a rack conversion kit — a sensible start if a server room is planned but later; the platform range is in the Servers section. The room itself should ideally have no windows, no water pipes above the ceiling, a lockable door and no storage function: a server room used as a store cupboard blocks airflow and adds fire load.
Networking and remote management
The first thing configured after installation is the remote management controller: iLO on HPE, iDRAC on Dell, XClarity on Lenovo, a BMC with IPMI elsewhere. It provides console, virtual media, power control and sensors regardless of the state of the operating system. Check two things: a dedicated management port (shared-LAN mode saves a cable but fails together with the main network) and the licence — remote graphical console and virtual media are usually licensed separately and should be bought with the server.
The management port goes into its own VLAN, reachable only from the administrative segment or over VPN, and is never published to the internet. For data, plan at least two ports into different switches with aggregation or bonding; if storage and backup are coming, size for 10G from the start. Switches and transceivers are in the Networking section, and how they fit together is covered in network cards and transceivers.
Think through the power-failure scenario. The UPS connects to the server over the network or USB, and an agent on the hypervisor gracefully shuts down virtual machines and the host before the batteries run flat. Also check the BIOS/UEFI behaviour on power restore: by default a server often stays off, and after a night-time outage you arrive to a dark rack.
The pre-purchase checklist
- 1. The room — dedicated, lockable, without windows or pipes above the ceiling.
- 2. Rack depth — from 1000 mm, and 1100 to 1200 mm with storage and dense cabling.
- 3. Units with headroom — the day-one requirement plus at least a third for growth.
- 4. Rails — the kit for your model and for the rack's mounting hole type.
- 5. Weight and logistics — floor loading, doorways, the lift, anchoring the rack.
- 6. Power calculation — from the vendor configurator with 20 to 30 % headroom.
- 7. A dedicated power line — its own breaker from the board, two PDUs, no domestic loads on the circuit.
- 8. UPS — double conversion, sized in watts, 10 to 20 minutes of runtime, shutdown agent.
- 9. Earthing — a proper loop with the rack and chassis connected.
- 10. Cooling — IT load plus 25 to 30 %, two air conditioners rotated, low-ambient kit.
- 11. Airflow and dust — front to back, blanking panels, filters, a cleaning schedule.
- 12. Monitoring and management — sensors with alerts, the iLO or iDRAC licence, a separate VLAN.
Related guides and tools: UPS calculator, File server and backup server, Server configurator, Dell PowerEdge.
Questions and answers
Can a server go into an ordinary 19-inch wall cabinet?
As a rule, no: wall cabinets lack the depth for server chassis and the bracket load rating, and a closed volume with no organised airflow overheats quickly. For a single server a deeper floor-standing cabinet with ventilation units is sometimes used, but it is a compromise.
How much UPS headroom should I allow?
Size against the total peak load of everything that will be fed, in watts, and add at least 20 to 30 % for expansion. Account for battery degradation: after two or three years the real runtime is noticeably below the rated figure, so headroom is needed in time as well. Exact values depend on the UPS model and battery type.
What if there is no space for a server room in the office?
Two workable options. The first is a tower server in a utility room, converted to rack mounting when a room appears. The second is colocation in a commercial data centre in Tashkent, where power, cooling and physical security already exist. The choice follows the availability requirements for your services and the rules that govern your data.
A properly prepared server room costs less than an emergency replacement of an overheated server plus business downtime. ITsmart engineers in Tashkent will calculate power and cooling for your configuration, select the rack, the UPS and the server itself, and handle installation and commissioning turnkey. Call +998 91 004 9858, write to info@itsmart.uz or Telegram. All contacts are on the Contacts page, and sizing advice is free.
