We are always on the hunt for new and interesting ways servers are deployed. From what we’ve found, Ikea is quite a computer friendly company. A variety of people have noticed that a great deal of Ikea products have enough room for a standard 19" rack mount chassis. The Lack is one of their tables that can be used as a cheap alternative to a standard rack at $10. According to the eth0 wiki, the LackRack was first seen at their 2010 Winterlan gathering.
We use a 114S11L as a test system in our lab, and figured it would be a perfect guinea pig for the LackRack. The installation wasn’t as easy as the instructions on the LackRack website made it seem, due to the fact that the legs are completely hollow now.
We had to use wall mounting brackets on the underside of the table in order to support the weight of the system. The system was deployed in our office for a couple of weeks as a virtualization node. 1u servers are generally a bit on the loud side.
This system, while relatively quiet compared to some 1u systems, created quite a bit of noise at times. After the first couple of days I got used to it, however, I can see how it would drive some people up the wall. Overall, I see this as a fun project for the home or office. I would probably just use it to mount switches or routers to due to noise issues.
However, there is the LackRack Enterprise Edition for larger systems with lower noise levels.
There are also other Ikea related projects out there, such as the 24 core cluster in a cabinet.
