It’s alive!
I’ve recently been building servers again. Aside from the usual 2U stuff, I thought I’d show a few pictures of the current project I’m working on. This 4U Supermicro chassis is destined to be used as our backup/storage server at the co-lo facility. VM backups, database backups, general file store, etc. etc.
Plenty of drive bays there (24 to be exact).
Here you can see how neat it is. Partly because of the good design of the case, and partly because of the tight integration with Supermicro’s own boards. The shroud that ducts air over the CPU also works wonders.
As you can imagine, it sounds like a jet taking-off when it’s going at full pelt. I wonder if co-los typically have an ‘upper noise limit’? 
I’ll put more detail down about what I’m doing with it a bit later… I’m currently testing all manner of Solaris-based distributions (a learning experience in its own right) with some funky zpool configurations. More to come!