Tonight I performed a tower-to-rack conversion of the Naiman Clarke primary server, a new Dell Poweredge 2900. You may ask why we didn’t just get the rack mountable 2950 version to start with? Well that IS what we ordered, however Dell got a little confused along the way. Anyway they made it up to us with some good discounts and a free rack conversion and rails kit.

Tonight I simply changed the face of the server and moved the control panel so it will be correctly oriented when the server is rack mounted. This was a bit of a process however and required the removal of all drives and bays as well as around 60 Torx screws. You can see these lying around on the floor while I am in the process of reassembling the machine. I also took a few photos of the internals just out of interest. There are some pretty big and noisy fans in there! I thought Woodcrest chips were meant to be power efficient and quiet?

Hover over the pictures for a description: