AMD Athlon MP 2200+ Server Roundup - September 2002

The Cases

For this roundup we focused on four specific chassis sizes - 1U, 2U and 4U. For those of you that aren't familiar with the terminology, rackmount chassis are measured according to their height - or the number of height units consumed in a rack.

A 1U chassis is about 1.75" tall, a 2U measures around 3" and as you can guess a 4U chassis is approximately 7" high. The benefit of going to a larger case is obviously that you get more options for expansion, the downside is that it takes up more room and thus ends up costing more in a colocation facility.

Racks can vary in size with a good sized rack usually around 40U tall; you can easily see the benefits of going to a smaller chassis when you divide that 40U rack by the number of 1U, 2U and 4U servers you can put in there. Being able to squeeze 40 1U servers is much more appealing than the measly 10 you would be able to accommodate with only 4U boxes. Colocation customers are usually billed a base fee depending on how much rackspace they use, so the denser you can get the better.

For a good comparison here are the three very common sizes stacked on top of one another:

From top to bottom - 1U, 2U & 4U

Click to Enlarge

From top to bottom - 1U, 2U & 4U

Click to Enlarge