SGI: Hardware

I've been planning to get a nice looking rack for some time now, one of those beautiful Altix racks would quite be to my liking. Only problem: my computer room is on the 1st floor, there's no way to transport a whole rack up the stairs. Is it possible to disassemble the thing in a way that one to two people can carry the parts upstairs?

seriously, no; you'd kill yourself.

I used the el-cheapo startech "build on the spot ikea style" half-racks recently and they are pretty nice actually for a plain old 4 post rack. Wheels are handy too.

You can try to lift it up and get it inside through the window

Thanks for the replies, seems I'll go with a DIY-rack

My Altix 350 rack is in the basement, a direct shot from the street (through the garage), and it took 3 people to move it. It was as empty and dismantled as could be. Next time I'll just build the house around it.

Is this all true? I have an Origin 3k rack and it has a lot of bolt heads, but I never really looked at taking it apart seriously.

I'm really interested in a short rack and there's an Altix one across the state from me, was thinking if I could knock it down flat I can put it in my station wagon and then reassemble in my upstairs living room.

I believe the short racks were bolted together but it's very uncommon for me to see a 42U rack that was bolted together. They were often welded.

I've gotten one of those racks up a flight of stairs once on my own. It aint' fun and you best have padding or you'll ruin any finishing you have on your stairs/doorframes.

I saw a "short" O3x00 rack half a year ago when I visited someone's place. It's stylish but not very practical as a general purpose 19" rack. It's vertical stands don't have the square holes for standard cage nuts for example, so you can't mount standard 19" rail kits in it. There was something else I think, IIRC it was less deep than a standard server rack. I'm pretty sure it's welded. I think almost everything except budget racks is welded.

I use a common 42U HP 10000 series G2 rack for servers and switches.

It absolutely is not as deep - well it's plenty deep, just not from the front to back rails. I found this out trying to mount a 2U Supermicro server in my O3k rack. However I have a stack of Origin 350s that would look great in a short rack with a router I'm considering buying.

I have a bunch of IBM 1U xSeries servers that actually fit quite nicely, although the rails are running into the power distro I added in my 39U rack. IBM having lots of round hole racks in their history has rails that fit quite nicely in the round holes. For everything else I have plenty of slip on cage nuts.

But this rack, I might pass on, surplus place want's $425, don't know how much they'd budge and it's ~$150 to drive out and back or ~$250 for freight. Not sure I'm quite that attached to it. And it's Altix, I think I'd be up for an Origin short rack more readily.

Regulars at TNMoC used to have a standing joke about a rack and an angle-grinder, whenever a problem of moving/fitting object X into space Y came up. Dunno if that was an SGI rack or another won't-disassemble-into-readily-movable-parts type.