Server rooms are built for the comfort of servers — not people. But those servers need maintenance, which means they need to be accessible. The resulting access corridors take up room that could be filled with more servers, which is why Jdw447 designed a claw machine-esque ‘modular server room’ and built a working scale model to demonstrate the concept.
This isn’t necessarily a serious proof of concept, as there would be a lot more to consider on top of simply moving the servers to an accessible location. But it is a novel idea that Jdw447 actually brought to life in the form of a relatively small model based on Oliver Shory’s gantry design. It is a bit like a claw machine mixed with a plotter. At actual server room scale, it would look like an overhead gantry crane. Here, it looks a bit like the motion system on a laser cutter.
The gantry is made of aluminum extrusion and 3D-printed joints. It has four stepper motors to move the gantry and to actuate the lifting mechanism, which grabs the model server racks using magnets. An Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls those motors through ULN2003 drivers, and the operator directs the movement using joysticks monitored by the Arduino.
This motion system sits in a large MDF box representing a server room, with several 3D-printed blocks representing the server racks arranged in a grid. When a “server” needs maintenance, the operator can use the gantry to pick it up and move it to the desired location.
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