Classy and Powerful

Its that time of the upgrade cycle for a client and we have to replace the 3 year old PowerEdge 1000s with something new and under warranty.

The Dell Poweredge R210 is an ultra compact 1U Rackmountable server it is customisable on purchase and for my mind it suits a Small to Medium Sized business of upto 50 workstations for File and Network services. These purchases  two  Ubuntu and Redhat Servers which are running on virtual instances under VirtualBox ( more on that another time ) .

 

What knocked this purchase out of the park for me was the mounting kit. Seriously the mounting kit was a work of engineering genius. It was a no tools , no fiddle , no scrapped knuckles mounting rail that meant the servers were installed in the cabinet in less than 5 minutes. I could hug the designer that made those rails.

 

 

 

 

Those little pegs replace the need for the nuts, bolts, pliers and screw driver combination that traditionally welcomes the unsuspecting system admin.

 

 

 

 

 

It is not easy to make out but the side of the R210 has two pegs into which the spars from the rail mount kit slip over and lock down by way of the tension spring which clips under the peg when flush.

The external rails are clearly labelled LEFT and RIGHT and the front and rear are clearly marked. The rails fit into the mounting points on the cabinet post and a small retaining hook stops them moving back out. The spars fitted to the case of the R210 are slid onto the rails and everything slips back and cleanly ‘clicks’ into place. It feels like your cheating to use these rails but if this is cutting corners then I say look the other way. Dell you rock for this creation, thank you.

 

Thanks for reading.