When housing your servers for your business needs, there are a number of different options when it comes to deciding how to keep these expensive and increasingly valuable pieces of equipment. Most of these servers will be stored in cabinets, which then leads you to an important decision: what type of shelves do you install within these cabinets to hold the actual servers. There are two specific types of shelves that can be installed: fixed and sliding shelves and both have their pluses and minuses based on what type of business you are doing and what the servers are needed for over time. Check out the pluses and minuses of fixed and sliding shelves listed below so you can determine which ones are right for your business needs.
FIXED SHELVES
Fixed shelves are, as the name implies, permanently installed in the server cabinet and work just like other shelves in cabinets work: they don’t move and hold servers of all sizes and weights. These fixed shelves are usually around one hundred dollars apiece, which is relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things when setting up a place to store your servers. They are ideal for servers that are going to be set up, put to use and then left alone by the IT department and only physically examined, moved or modified every so often. The fixed shelves make them more difficult to access on a regular basis.
SLIDING SHELVES
Sliding shelves are also explanatory by their name, as they are shelves that are on rails with wheels, allowing them to slide the server or tower out of the cabinet to be looked at, modified or fixed. This is important for a company that plans on regularly working with their servers on a weekly or monthly basis, as these sliding shelves will provide easier access to the IT department, or whoever is designated to work with the hardware. However, these sliding shelves are a bit more expensive, usually priced at around one hundred thirty dollars, as opposed to the fixed shelves one hundred dollar cost. Depending on how many servers and shelves you are installing, this difference in cost could be substantial.