The Rack English

The translation of the word rack refers to a frame, a frame or structure where we can hang or hold things to have them organized. In computer science, a rack is basically a cabinet with 4 internal metallic profiles that allow us to fix and organize inside the different components of a computer or telecommunications installation, equipment such as servers, switches, sais, storage systems, computers, network systems and telephony, etc.



Depending on the nature of the installation, we can find inside one of these cabinets a wide variety of devices with the particularity that all of them have had to be manufactured to be compatible with the standard of 19 inches, which is only a few measures previously defined and that when taken into account both by the manufacturers of Rack cabinets and by the hardware that will go inside, they ensure the compatibility between both.


Height and width of a rack

A rack unit or simply U is a unit of   measure used to describe the height of the equipment prepared to be mounted in a rack 19 or 23 inches wide (48.26 cm or 58.42 cm). A rack unit equals 1.75 inches (4.445 cm) tall.

A rack unit is usually written as 1U; in the same way two units are written 2U and so on. The height of a piece of equipment in a rack is often described as a U number.

A common use for a 19-inch rack (also called 19-inch rack) is to host servers allowing dense hardware configurations without taking up too much space or requiring shelving. The vast majority of the racks are 42U, approximately 78 inches (2 meters) high. Normally professional audio and video equipment comes with rack mounting options and uses the same measurement specifications. A third common use for rack mounting is industrial power, control and automation hardware, usually in 46U racks.

Internal elements of a Rack