Description
(ignore cable monster behind rack, I ran out of bolts for my blank plates, and I'm still printing my cable organizers)
What started as a Rackmate T1, expanded into what I call the T3 (T1+T2) when I received the new T2 as a belated birthday present. I'm not going to complain about the 20u of rack space! My rack houses my home network equipment, as well as my plex server, small NAS, and 6 NUC cluster. I had been putting off buying a full size server rack cabinet when I saw Jeff's YouTube video on the Rackmate T0 and T1. I thought this would be a fun form factor to use, so I ordered up a T1. Since most people 3D print their mounts for this form factor I also picked up a Creality K2 plus so I could design and print all my mounts/shelves. Everything in the rack sits behind an APC UPS that the 2 power strips vertically mounted on the back rack rails plug into.
Network Gear:
- Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra - Router/Firewall that handles my dual WAN. I have both fiber and regular cable internet for my house
- Unifi Cloud Key Gen2 + - For managing my Unifi protect
- Unifi Lite 16 POE switch
- Netgear GS308EP 8 POE switch
- Various smart home hubs & bridges
To fit all 6 NUCs in the rack in a 3U space, I took them out of their cases and put them on this open frame that slots into the rack shelf I designed. The picture above doesn't have all 6 in the rack while I'm figuring out my power solution for them. They have a 4pin power connector on the fan side of the board which has inspired me to design a PDU system for them. Right now they are using the external power bricks, and I didn't have a shelf for the other 3 bricks to sit on.
Compute:
- 6x NUC13 i5 with 64gb ddr4 memory and grab bag assortment of old NVME drives. Cluster for running my variety of home lab services.
- MS-01 i5 with 64gb ddr5 memory and 980 evo 1tb nvme. Also has LSI sas card to connect to icy dock SSD enclosure
- Icy dock 8 drive enclosure with 8 2tb Dell enterprise SSDs (thanks PCR bin)
The T1 and T2 bolt together pretty well. I have a 120mm fan that sits between them to blow air up to the shelf that has my NUC cluster. I also have a fan on the top of the T1 to provide a little ventilation to the network stack up top.
What's next? Waiting on more bolts to arrive, and the parts for my power distribution system. I'm also waiting for Nvidia's project digits to release to see if it would be worth building an AI compute cluster to take up the remaining 4.5U of space that I have for now.