Building a Datacentre level Server Rack

Introduction

Nowadays we expect our production servers to be on line and available 100% of the time. If you are building the infrastructure to put production servers in with the view to them being available to as close to 100% of the time as possible you need to think from the ground up. This document is written with the view of building a server rack infrastructure that will give good system uptime. I am not saying the solution descibed here is the best or the only one and there will be parts that others will do differently but I think it will have some ideas that most people who build server room infrastructure can relate to. In my article I am using the following components:

Components

2 X UPS
2 X Power Distribution Units (PDUS)
2 X Cisco Nexus 5010 Switches
4 X Cisco Fabric extenders

Assorted HP Proliant G5/G6 servers - with DUAL Power Supply Units

1 x Cisco 2650 Switch for iLO. This is optional in my example I have used a seperate switch purely for the iLO network. This is because I wanted to keep the iLO physically seperate so operational and support staff can see at a glance that iLO connections are seperate from the main network. This of course is optional especially since not everyone is using HP servers.

Overview Diagram