On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Joe Abley wrote:
Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of
routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites for
deployment?
The idea is to increase the consistency of the deployments by having them all
built in one place by the same set of people, and to reduce the amount of
time required by warm bodies on-site (bodies that would otherwise have to
receive individual components and install/cable them).
The issue you might run into is dealing with pre-racked components that
end up getting damaged in transit. I've seen shippers do creative things
with forklifts and pallet jacks :(
On the flip side, telcos often do this. I know Verizon builds (or at
least they did for a long time) racks and cabinets for deployment at
customer deployment a central facility, then ships the finished product
for installation. In this area (Pittsburgh, PA), the cabinets were built
and tested at a Verizon assembly facility in Martinsburg, WV.
If you do move ahead with this and do use 4-post cabinets, make sure most
of the devices can be secured to both the front and rear posts. That
wouldn't apply to things like patch panels, but 1U servers and 1U network
devices are often somewhat lacking in terms of sturdy mounting harrdware
that's designed to accommodate the rigors of shipping.
As for shippers, I don't know if I would trust something as valuable or
fragile to a regular LTL freight carrier. You might want to look at
someone like FedEx Custom Critical. In my previous life, customers would
ship their gear to our data center using them. Not cheap by any
stretch... Also, if the source or destination does not have a real
loading dock, your shipments will likely be more expensive if the shipper
has to use a lift-gate truck.
We've located a few vendors who sell shock-tolerant cabinets, but they're
expensive and seem to me to be aimed at people who need to ship a set of
equipment frequently (e.g. to support movie shoots, outside broadcasts, etc),
rather than people who want to ship just once.
Right. Companies like Calzone Cases, Jan-Al, Penn Fabrication and Hardigg
can build cabinets for this purposes but they are designed for stuff that
lives 'on the road', such as touring sound equipment.
Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets, or
should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to wrap the
cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?
There are shock-mount pallets and shipping frames that can be used - they
often bolt to the bottom of the cabinet and then there is often a 'bumper'
for the top of the cabinet and then the whole works is shrink-wrapped
together.
jms
