Hardware Wanted

I recently moved to a new house, and it has a second small "office" building on the terrain. It has two rather spatious rooms and a separate 3 x 40A power, so... the plan is to make it my office once I finish fixing the roof, wiring etc; one room with the desks and appliances etc, and one as "server/demo" room. Naturally, I'd need a few server racks in there (well, I wouldn't *need* it. I do *want* it though ).

Does anyone know of a reliable firm, preferrably in Europe (shipping costs!), who sells refurbished SGI server racks? For anything non-SGI I know http://www.serverhome.nl , and that's more or less what I'm looking for: a professional party, large stock, and all the accessories that you could need to go with it (PDUs, KVM, ...).

This is more or less what I'm looking for (quick 10-second google search):



Basically something that can house a bunch of standard rackmount servers and equipment without being the boring grey/black that is standard today and if it'd have an SGI label, that'd be a huge plus.

"standard rackmount" is a lofty term. Make sure the stuff you have fits what you buy!

It's not that unusual to see empty or nearly empty sgi racks on ebay these days, usually origins and altixs, not sure where they're selling from, or rather I don't recall ever having looked, probably mostly from the US though, which helps you not at all...

if you wanna just use the sgi racks for the looks and put some commodity junk inside; that'd be almost as bad as octane case modding

foetz wrote: if you wanna just use the sgi racks for the looks and put some commodity junk inside; that'd be almost as bad as octane case modding

Well, I wouldn't want to gut a proper SGI machine just for the rack 't was just the first pic I found. But I suppose they made "just" racks as well? Not all SGI servers were big enough to warrant a full rack for their own...

Also: not for hosting commodity junk, I have a cheapo server at Hetzner for those workloads but there's the ES47, some HP-UX machines, VMS, ... that'd be less of a disgrace to an SGI rack, wouldn't it?

Alver wrote: But I suppose they made "just" racks as well?

The storage racks are probably 'standard' 19" racks but an O3000 rack is not .
A standard 19" rack has square(ish) holes in the vertical stands for cage nuts:

Have a good look at photos and techpubs what is there instead in an O3K rack, it has some mounting holes spaced at the height of a C-brick, specifically for the sliding rails that the C bricks sit on. So you might be able to mount "something" every 4 or 5U, but as a general purpose 19" rack it's useless.

Ask Rusti about his O3200 half high rack -- I saw it when I was at his place and while stylish, it just isn't a very functional 19" rack. Or go see him, he's in the Brussels area.

PS: I like your ambition

jan-jaap wrote: Ask Rusti about his O3200 half high rack -- I saw it when I was at his place and while stylish, it just isn't a very functional 19" rack.

It is possible to fit some third party gear in SGI's O3k-era short rack. An 8-core Dell Precision R5400 hackintosh currently lives in mine. The R5400 is mounted on Dell versa-rails - the Dell rails bolted in without issue and everything functions correctly, including the cable management arm. Before the R5400 I had a Dell T114 PowerVault with two LTO4 SAS tape drives in there (also with versa-rails), though the T114 has since been moved to an SGI O2k tall rack.

Altix 350 (2U) do fit perfectly in my Compaq 10622 and HP 10642 racks, as HP DL145 (1U) and 385 (2U) do, so I would assume the racks that were sold with Altix 350 series would accept all standard 19" equipment.

Alver wrote: but there's the ES47, some HP-UX machines, VMS, ... that'd be less of a disgrace to an SGI rack, wouldn't it?

i guess that could be forgiven

@BetXen: "The Silicon Graphics collection was saved in extremis when the parent company closed its European production plant in Cortaillod, Switzerland. Almost all the company's models are in the collection, from the Personal Iris to the large production Onyx. This collection includes some unique pieces."

Glad to read this!
http://www.memoires-informatiques.org/? ... onsors=yes

Such a shame your outside of the UK, as I have a couple of very interesting SGI racks here in good condition but I just don't have the time or the energy to ship one overseas - they are several hundred kilos (Thanks to SGI's over engineering..) once packed up properly.

The ones I have are custom branded versions of this :



It's an Ice system.

Oh and yes, water cooling system in the rear doors.... (Although the one most of you guys would want as it has racks for non SGI kit installed, does not have the water cooling, it's got a nice vented rear door and weighs 70kg less. )

If anyone else in the UK is after an interesting SGI cabinet for there collection please get in touch.

Big and heavy though, you'd need a tail lift van and they are taking up a lot of space so won't be here for that long.

Arghl! Those are *great*... but 450km away (which wouldn't be an issue, if there wouldn't be a spat of water inbetween)... bummer, that's exactly what I was aiming for indeed

@Geoman: That's right, Yves has a lot of machine coming directly from Cortaillod. There are even some photos somewhere of their trip over there. In particular he has some signed machines, e.g. the 5000th Indy R5K or sth like that, lots of octanes, Indigo2's and 4D series (including my former one) and even some Onyx2 racks.

I've just found some pictures I took a long time ago in his storage area... have a look !

Some of the machines are exposed in the entrance area of the IT department from time to time, but unfortunately most of them are in storage.

now that's a stock

foetz wrote: now that's a stock start

Fixed that for you.

smj wrote:

foetz wrote: now that's a stock start

Fixed that for you.

You think he's kidding ... at smj's place, if you ask to use the bathroom he says, "Sure ! Sure, no problem. Can't get there through the hall, it's full. But here, take this path through the kitchen. When you get to the stack of HP-9000's, veer right. Then at the NeXT turboslabs, joggle around the Indy's on your left. A few yards farther you should see some RS/6000's, if you squeeze in behind them you can get through the opening into the bathroom. Just take the Atari's off the seat if you want to pee."

It's actually easier to go outside and climb in through the window

That's right, that's absolutely right. Because in fact, hamei's never seen my house. He's seen my fake house, which has some furniture in it, because my real house is packed wall-to-wall with Twiggy-drive Lisas and Macs, Cray-1s, dozens of max config IRIS 3130s, Xerox Altos, original Connection Machines, the fabled prototype "Minnow" desktop PDP10 connected to a Symbolics Framethrower, unbuilt Altair 8800 and Heathkit H11 kits, NeXT prototypes based on the Motorola 88000, a complete set of every SGI desktop machine with clear plastic skins, a PDP-11 running OS/2 that I can't tell anybody on classiccmp about, and I have Gary Kildall and Steve Jobs - both deaths were faked - locked up in my basement.

And they're all in or on awesome purple SGI racks.

That's right chumps - y'all got nuthin' on me.

smj wrote: That's right, that's absolutely right. Because in fact, hamei's never seen my house. He's seen my fake house, which has some furniture in it, because my real house is packed wall-to-wall with Twiggy-drive Lisas and Macs, Cray-1s, dozens of max config IRIS 3130s, Xerox Altos, original Connection Machines, the fabled prototype "Minnow" desktop PDP10 connected to a Symbolics Framethrower, unbuilt Altair 8800 and Heathkit H11 kits, NeXT prototypes based on the Motorola 88000, a complete set of every SGI desktop machine with clear plastic skins, a PDP-11 running OS/2 that I can't tell anybody on classiccmp about, and I have Gary Kildall and Steve Jobs - both deaths were faked - locked up in my basement.

And they're all in or on awesome purple SGI racks.

That's right chumps - y'all got nuthin' on me.

My sarcasm detector is really confused. Should I go ahead and cancel that 18 wheeler truck + pack of Albanian thieves heading for your place, or shouldn't I?

If any of them can make a decent tavë kosi or çomlek , and the truck is loaded with rakia , keep 'em coming!

You forgot your dual processor PDP-6 and octa-core prototype BeBox