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| By Chris Angelini | ||||
ACCORDING TO DATA FROM GRUBB & Ellis, Class A office space—the highest quality available—in San Francisco was selling for $622 a square foot in the second quarter of 2007, up from $322 in 2005. Naturally, higher sale prices translate to higher rents for the businesses populating those buildings. Within that same period, landlords bumped their asking prices from $32.30 a square foot, annually, to $41.80 a square foot. Of course, the cost of rent around the country is going to vary wildly. But there’s no way to escape the fact that land is a finite resource. You don’t want to pack your SMB customers full of pedestal workstations, with servers all over the floor and peripherals polluting everyone’s desk. You have to quantify the value of every square foot consumed by the hardware you sell and then the upgrades that follow six months or a year down the line. For larger business customers, space might be less of a concern in relation to technology. They’re the ones who are already using rack enclosures, blade servers, and networked printers. Big businesses have IT departments tasked with the job of managing technology resources. Upgrades are planned and executed. Perhaps that’s why a handful of the vendors and resellers we’ve talked to believe SMBs don’t really need racks. Smaller organizations are perceived as better candidates for pedestal boxes and floor-standing battery backups, which support themselves sans the expensive infrastructure. But those businesses have to realize that at a certain point the infrastructure pays for itself, whether it’s in saved office space at $40 a square foot or the added service charges tied to maintaining a poorly implemented network sprawled all over the floor of a storage closet. REASONS TO RACK Resellers accustomed to working in SMB environments are probably nodding along, agreeing with the notion that it’s easier to sell budget-conscious businesses servers, networking equipment, and software without having to worry about four or five digits worth of future-minded extras. I can certainly sympathize. SMBs just getting off of the ground with centralized data and corporate email like to fire back with, “Do I really need this $5,000 server to handle messaging? My ISP is already doing the job for $25 bucks a month.” Ah, yes. But when you show them the collaborative features in SharePoint and the ease of saving an Exchange database under SBS 2003, the story gets a lot more compelling. Taking control of IT gives SMBs with enterprise aspirations much more power. Dictate what employees can do with their machines. Set policies enforcing the preservation of data subject to federal regulations. Ensure that any disaster is recoverable by performing regular backups and taking information off-site. Without a solid rack system in place, the first server in your customer’s grand scheme sits benignly on the floor in an office. Maybe it adds a little noise, perhaps some extra heat. By the time a second server is needed, your customer can already start to see the direction this is headed. Of course, as we move forward, virtualization and multi-core processors might help VARs consolidate hardware, keeping server sprawl to a minimum. But you just can’t get around some of the reasons to expand, such as adding storage, which is inevitable when you consider the rate at which capacity is growing. In 2008, we’ll be looking at close to 8,000 petabytes of internal and external storage capacity and approaching 12,000 petabytes in 2009, according to research from IDC and AMCC. What about the other components with which you’d populate a rack? A typical SMB is going to use at least one server, a networking switch, protection, and hopefully some sort of backup/archival device. Also, an increasing number of customers with burgeoning data archives are turning to JBODs for storing data that just won’t fit on the four hard drives of a typical 1U server. Try arranging all of that equipment on the floor of an SMB’s office, complete with its rat’s nest of cabling, and watch them cringe as you carry each new box in the front door. MAKING A PLAY You approach a small business looking to centralize data on a network with a server running SBS 2003, upgrade 10 existing workstations to Windows XP Professional, and protect the data with a network storage box. The total price tag, with your service, comes in at about $12,000. If you add the rack that I use in my office—Belkin’s 24U Premium Enclosure from its Integration Series—you’re looking at another $1,200 tacked onto the bill. Of course, that assumes you sell the rack by itself. These things are like sports cars. The base model is nice, but the options are sometimes hard to live without. Belkin’s OmniView 15” LCD console, which keeps you from having to stack a monitor on top of the rack, runs another $1,600. Fans and blowers to cycle air through the enclosure cost between $230 and $760 each. Shelves used to store rack equipment not on rails are priced all the way up to $329. Then you get into cable management, filler panels, and casters. The extras can quickly add up to be a quarter or more of the sale’s final cost. Of course, not every SMB is going to need 24U of rack space. Upselling a smaller enclosure is a great way to save some money. Rackmount Solutions’ TR9-32F, a 9U tabletop rack with Plexiglas doors and built-in cooling, offers plenty of value to small businesses going light on stacked equipment. The $559 box comes with some of the same options for which Belkin charges and is built with similar quality. Rackmount’s tabletop enclosures range between 3U and 15U. Its larger cabinets measure from 11U to 48U, with variable depths and widths, per Electronics Industries Association rackmount standards. Most comparable pedestal and rackmount components, from servers to battery backup units, are fairly similar in price. If the only extra piece of hardware your customer has to buy is a $600 enclosure to store it all, the sale shouldn’t be a stretch. Investing in the larger Belkin unit also makes sense when you consider the likelihood of an upgrade. If your customer says 24U is way more than he needs, do some quick math and you’ll see those 1.75” units disappear in a hurry. Then factor in one or two spots for an entry-level server, two or three for power protection, another unit for an LCD console, another one or two for networking equipment, a 2U storage appliance, and perhaps one space for a physical security appliance. That’s 11U consumed by fairly basic puzzle pieces and doesn’t include shelves. BUILDING SMART RACKS Much of what your customer thinks about a new rack is going to be determined by how you configure the enclosure. Regardless of whether the box will be moving around, install heavy items, such as batteries, at the bottom. Components that you might actually need to service work well in the middle, where they’re easy to pull out, open up, and access. Lighter objects, such as network switches, KVMs, and smaller storage appliances, can all go to the top where they won’t get in anyone’s way. An SMB with servers under a desk probably isn’t too concerned about heat or even power if there are a couple of outlets nearby. Concentrating all of a business’ technology into one enclosure should prompt you to draw some attention to both subjects. A typical power outlet is going to give you 120V times 15VA of power, or 1,800 watts maximum. Add up the highest consumption limit for each installed device and see if it exceeds 1,800 watts. Better yet, give yourself a 20% or 30% buffer—enough for another component or two without hitting the socket’s technical limit, which is never a good thing to be pushing. If it looks like you’ll be going over the top or uncomfortably close to it, have an electrician install a NEMA 5-20R or NEMA 5-30R receptacle to accommodate output loads up to 2,400W. Don’t flinch—that’s the cost of doing business. Hopefully, your commercial customer will be using the technology you sell to increase his capacity for making money instead of trying to get by with the bare minimum. Though skating by might work today, any move to expand will require an upgrade, costing more than doing the job right the first time. Cooling is another one of those considerations that you’d better nail. Overheating components are going to cause all sorts of stability issues. If there’s one sure way to get an SMB owner wondering why he started spending money on more technology, it’s a server that won’t stay up. Fortunately, most racks either have built-in cooling or are offered with a long list of cooling options. Here’s another great place to demonstrate your value as a reseller. Some rack enclosures are perforated, meaning air is able to flow through the rack freely thanks to vents cut into the metal structure. Others are fully sealed and don’t let any ambient air into the rack. If you’re using perforated racks, ambient air cooling—whether it be from fans, blowers, or the computer room air conditioning unit—is going to keep temperatures down. A sealed rack requires liquid cooling or a rack air conditioner. Do the math and show your customers exactly what they need. Like power, you have to provide your customer with ample cooling. It isn’t enough to eyeball the chassis, drop in a couple of fans, and call it a day. There are actual formulas that will help determine the appropriate cooling capacity for your racks. First, add up the power consumption of the devices in the enclosure. You should have already done this in order to establish a minimum level of power protection. After taking volts times amps to generate a wattage figure, multiply watts by 3.413, yielding a result in BTUs (British thermal units) per hour. Most air conditioning units are rated in BTUs, so finding the right unit for an enclosed rack shouldn’t be difficult once you work the numbers. SELLING SECURITY After collecting your customer’s valuable pieces of technology and installing them on a rack, physical security should be just as important as network security. Not that security was an afterthought before, but an SMB with hardware stashed all around is going to have a much tougher time keeping an eye on it. Rackmount hardware gives you protection power that was previously unavailable. At the most basic level, sell racks with locking front and back doors to keep prying hands away from where they don’t belong. Beyond that, APC’s NetBotz lineup gives you even more flexibility in physical security. For example, the NetBotz 500 consists of a base station, camera pod, and sensor pod. The Camera Pod 120 sports a color camera supporting resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 30 fps, an internal mic, a jack for external speakers, and a door switch sensor. The Sensor Pod 120 features environmental sensors that cover temperature, humidity, dew point, airflow, and audible alarms. If APC’s NetBotz 500 triggers, alerts are sent through email, SNMP, text messaging, FTP, HTTP, and Web Services to let you know there’s a condition that needs to be addressed. Even when everything is working well, the system logs periodic reports. In its stock form, the NetBotz 500 has enough storage for 24 hours of data retention. An optional 60GB Storage System extends alert and sensor storage up to six months. RACKS FOR EVERYONE I know from experience that selling hardware to an SMB using peer-to-peer workstations with USB hard drives running backups can be difficult. Business owners tend to bank on what they know works well. A reseller courting that customer already has his work cut out for him before ever bringing up a rackmount environment. But it’s the rack itself that gives your proposition so much strength. From centralizing hardware, saving valuable office space, and protecting technology with physical security, racking makes a lot of sense, even for SMBs. The racks you sell don’t have to be 42U or even 24U towers. Small businesses on a budget can easily get away with 6U or 9U enclosures priced under $600. Load up the servers, power protection, networking equipment, and NAS box into a well-cooled rack. At around $40 a square foot in San Francisco, you might actually save your customer money in the long run. |
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