| > I somehow expected more density for a custom arrangement like this. One eviscerated mini per sled, ten sleds per rackmount chassis, six chassis per rack: sixty minis in 42-48U. If Apple isn't willing to manufacture an off-the-shelf offering, what did you expect? That's... pretty dense... As far as off-the-shelf desktop things turned in-house rack mount sled chassis builds go, 60 Minis in 48U (with _all_ the supporting bits – multiple network switches etc) is pretty damn good? > I'm willing to believe that there are cooling and airflow advantages to the sleds Nah the benefits are all management, maintenance, and isolation. Not to mention the sled chassis providing A/B power feed support, IPMI-esque management from the host chassis for each sled, etc etc. The benefits are massive and have nothing to do with cooling/airflow. > although those two small fans at the back of the sled don't look too exciting. I can assure you those 40mm fans _scream_. > The biggest advantage seems to be ~~cable management~~ and the ease of sliding out a single mini at a time. Bingo. Single sled failure and the ability to swap to a spare/repair the broken one outside of production by pressing your thumb on a trigger and pulling towards you. Huge win vs the off-the-shelf 'rack your factory Mini in this metal cage on rack rails' scenario. Not to mention you now have the ability to assign jobs/builds intelligently at a sled/host chassis level. Isolation & proper distribution of jobs at that granularity (and cabinet, power phase feed consumption, A/B feeds, cabinet row(s), etc) is very valuable. This shit is really, really dope. |