I need one more Server!
Hear me out. I thought I had built the ultimate version of my home lab, just to realize I need one more server.
Firstly, what was supposed to be my main powerhouse server ended up becoming my daily parsec rig. When I'm at home, I'll parsec into my rig from a tiny client to essentially do everything, from watching youtube, playing video games and surfing the internet.
That means that my main server's GPU barely has any time to allocate its bandwidth for running AI and LLM services.
Secondly, my NAS is currently like my mothership. It holds all of my critical data backups, assets, databases, container volumes, etc. So I need a backup NAS in case things go wrong which all my services can quickly migrate to when necessary.
To accomplish my goals and solve the last few problems I have with my rack, I need a 2U server.
Why 2U you might ask?
Space constraints
I have only 12 precious U's of space on my rack, as I am using two stacked Unifi Toolless Mini Racks, which offer 6U of space each.
3 Rows occupied by my personal rig, 2 rows of raspberry pis, 2 rows of networking gear, a 2 row NAS and a 2 row PDU. And 1 row of patch panel that I cannot get rid of.
This means that the only real space that I can make is by mounting the PDU on the back side, and freeing up two rows of space. Two rows also seem to be the perfect size for rack mounted gear, as I sometimes feel like my 3U Sliger chassis is a bit too excessive and can also downsize.
I can theoretically get another Unifi mini rack and expand my rack by another 6 rows, but Unifi's stacking kit is only designed for stacking two mini racks together, not three.
Ubiquiti
I think we can still do a triple stack setup, although it will sacrifice some structural rigidity, and apparently it might break the casters.
That said, probably just freeing up the 2U space might be my best bet for now.
Dimension Constraints
The Unifi rack also has a few other problems:
It doesn't have traditional mounting holes for rack mountable ears. Instead, there are these thin platforms on each side of the rack that a rack mountable equipment can rest on top of. These platforms only allow up to a maximum width of 442 mm (excluding the ears). Many rack mountable equipment is within 442 mm, but not all are - for instance, a Pi rack that I bought from Amazon ended up being closer to 444mm and not fitting:
A rack mountable shelf that I also bought from Amazon had schematics showing that it was only 440mm edge-to-edge, but it actually had screws holding the assembly together which added another 1.5mm of width on both sides, ending up with a total actual width of 443mm and not fitting.
Racknex, who creates really awesome rack mountable shelves for SBCs, Mini PCs and other small form factor computes also confirmed to me that their fixed mount stuff (the ones without rails on the side) are 445mm, while the rail mount stuff are 415mm without the rails. Luckily, the Raspberry Pi rack mount that I bought from them were of the rail-mount type, which meant I was able to fit it on my Unifi rack.
racknex-Team
Width constraint aside, we also have a depth constraint.
The Unifi mini rack is not deep. From front to back, it is about 18" or 460mm, and anything longer will stick out of the back (or front) like a sore thumb.
And unfortunately, most of the cases that had hot swappable bays on the front were way too long.
This means that I am very limited with options:
- It must have less than 18" of depth and width must fit on the Unifi Rack
- 2U height
- Hotswappable drive bays on the front, as I want this to be a NAS first and foremost
- Or as an alternative, at least 2x 5.25 bays where I can install aftermarket backplanes
- Support for full-height (2 row) PCI-E GPUs. I would prefer some kind of full-size solution, but half-height is also doable.
These "shallower" servers seem to be referred to in the market as "Telco Servers" due to the nature of the type of rack (ie: wall mounted racks) and how they are deployed (usually in an accessible common area rather than in a dedicated server room)
Shopping Time
The first server that caught my eye was the EB202-CP from AIC, which is sold through MITXPC here in the US.
It pretty much checks all of the marks and even support two full length full height GPUs, but it's just a tad bit too long at 22". It's really a bummer because other than the size (and ridiculous price) it looked like the prefect server.
The SKY-7223D from Advantech also looks really nice, with perfect dimensions, and a ton of FL/FH pcie slots.
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Only problem is I'm not sure if I'm even able to purchase one, and not sure if I'll ever properly utilize a dual Xeon build. I'd rather want less power and less noise than this much compute.
From the consumer side of things, there seems to be the Inwin IW-R200-02N, which is also roughly 2 inches too deep but otherwise checks most other boxes.
There is an option for replacing the half height PCIE with 3x full height PCIE bracket,
And also hotswap storage bays that would fit in the 5.25 bays.
And finally I've landed on a middle-ground solution, also from AIC, the RMC-2E.
At 17.2 inches wide (437mm) and exactly 18" deep, this seems like the perfect match-made-in-heaven, which includes a redundant PSU and a PCI-E riser cable for the FHFL slot.
Some other folks on reddit seems to have successfully transplanted their existing rigs into this tiny chassis, so this seems like the most reasonable option.
I guess I'll see you on my next paycheck! (And also after I decide what specs I want to run on this)
