First Home Rack
I purchased a smoked glass cabinet with exhaust fans and a slide out keyboard/monitor tray.
I filled it primarily with Sun Solaris machines but also had an 8mm tape drive for backups, a 6 drive SCSI raid, and a UPS.
Each machine served a dedicated function – mail server, portal server, web servers, etc.
In the rear of the rack you can see the cable modem, a dial-in phone modem, dedicated firewall device, and Cisco switch.
This is the sad day when I called it quits on the server rack. Coincidentally that was the day my electric meter also stopped spinning too fast to make out the numbers on it.
Current Setup
I don’t run my own datacenter any more.
Since I work from home full time I have found that need a good bit of desktop real estate. This was taken before I added the 7th screen and now need twin graphics cards in my desktop to drive them all.
Also not pictured is the dedicated Linux box and screen to go with it. I say dedicated but that’s not entirely accurate. At times it has been a dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu, and currently it is running Proxmox (bare metal) to experiment with that. I have ESX-i downloaded but since I already have experience with that I wanted to play with Proxmox first.
The question I always get is “why?!!?”
The best answer for that is the type of work I do and it’s impossible to really explain it well. I find that I lose (a not insignificant amount of) time switching windows all day. With multiple screens I can keep an eye on Slack (or Teams, whatever the company is using), email, and monitoring stuff. I can see them at a glance on 2 or 3 screens while working on the others. The others might be the ticketing system, documents I am updating, Linux terminals (galore), etc.
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