{"id":1849,"date":"2013-10-18T13:08:19","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T02:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macquarietelecom.com\/?p=1849"},"modified":"2023-03-01T16:43:09","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T05:43:09","slug":"designed-mini-rack-intellicentre-data-centres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macquarietechnologygroup.com\/news\/designed-mini-rack-intellicentre-data-centres\/","title":{"rendered":"How and why we designed the “Mini Rack” for our Intellicentre data centres"},"content":{"rendered":"
John Truong<\/i><\/b>, our Product Manager for Colocation, explains how we developed a brand new rack form factor for our colocation customers \u2013 the ‘Mini Rack’, offering 6RU of dedicated space for when a full sized rack isn\u2019t required.<\/i><\/p>\n
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I\u2019d like to tell you the story behind our new Mini-Rack product, exclusive to Macquarie Telecom<\/strong> and designed by us for our Intellicentre colocation customers.<\/p>\n Most standard dedicated colocation rack products require a customer to take a full-sized rack (usually around 42RU) or a half-sized rack (around 20RU).<\/p>\n Taking a full or half-sized rack is not cost-effective in some circumstances. For example, small businesses often require between 1RU \u2013 6RU space for a small server, firewall or switch environment. Similarly, enterprises sometimes have a need for hosting smaller standalone devices such as WAN accelerators, tape drive enclosures, NAS boxes, a UPS, or Google search appliances.<\/p>\n The way the industry has been serving this market has been with shared-rack colocation products. Shared-rack colocation is where a traditional full rack is “sliced up” and customers purchase and share the rack on a per RU basis.<\/p>\n The concept of shared-rack colocation has been around for decades. Ever since organisations started outsourcing their data centre racks to colocation providers, there has always been a requirement for small colocation spaces.<\/p>\n The way most colocation providers mitigate these risks is by mandating that customer access to shared racks are escorted and chaperoned by a staff member. Unfortunately, while escorted access may provide a level of security oversight, it does not eliminate the risks outlined above and accidents can still happen. Furthermore, if customers spend a few hours working on their environment in a shared rack, the escort staff\u2019s time is being used for a generally low-value task.<\/p>\n These risks were all taken into account when we designed the Colocation Mini-Rack at Intellicentre 2, and its features eliminate many of the issues identified with shared racks. After having reviewed the needs of our customers, as above, we commissioned a special design exclusive to Macquarie Telecom that would best fit the usage scenarios our customers have. Working directly with the manufacturer, we then tested and deployed these mini-racks into optimal locations in Intellicentre 2. We were able to bring a unique product to market.<\/p>\n In developing the Colocation Mini-Rack product we hope that even customers with small colocation requirements can enjoy all the benefits of outsourcing their data centre to Intellicentre 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
However, shared-rack colocation raises a number of risks:<\/h3>\n
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