Server Chassis Documentation and Support

Whether you integrate a motherboard and chassis of your choice to create a server or use a commercially manufactured server, you need to obtain the documentation available for your server chassis and have a means to obtain professional technical support for that chassis.

The Importance of Documentation

You can obtain documentation for a separately purchased chassis from the chassis manufacturer. This information might be as brief as a mechanical drawing and a marked list of components, or it might be much more in-depth. Generally, chassis manufactured for a particular server motherboard or series of server motherboards tend to be better-documented than those made for a wide variety of server motherboards. The documentation for a particular server chassis might include some or all of the following information:

• Motherboards supported (either by form factor or specific models)

• Drive bays

• Whether hot-swap SCSI or SATA drives are supported

• Cooling fan sizes and locations

• Optional hardware (hot-swap adapters, passive processor coolers, and so on)

If the chassis is included as part of a preconfigured server, you can contact the server manufacturer for detailed documentation. Intel and Supermicro (www.supermicro.com), for example, provide separate chassis and server documentation.

Intel uses the chassis model number as part of the server platform model number. (Intel uses the term server platform to refer to a particular combination of motherboard and chassis.) Here are some examples:

• SR2400JR2 This server is based on the SR2400 2U rack-mounted chassis.

• SR1425BK1-E This server is based on the SR1425-E11 1U rack-mounted chassis.

• SC5300AF2 This server platform is based on the SC5300LX pedestal rack-mounted chassis.

The component list for each Intel server platform clearly identifies which chassis was used, and the documentation for each chassis is available separately from the Intel website (www.intel.com).

Other major server vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com), Tyan (www.tyan.com), and Dell (www.dell.com) provide chassis information as part of the documentation for their servers. Sometimes the chassis documentation is part of a maintenance and service guide for a particular server model.

Generally, major chassis and server manufacturers make their documentation available as an Adobe PDF file that you can download and view before you purchase a server or server chassis.

Manufacturer Policies on Opening Chassis

If you assembled a server motherboard and chassis, you are the manufacturer, and there are no restrictions on your ability to open the system and service it as needed. Generally, for most pedestal and rack-mounted servers, manufacturers recommend that only technically skilled users open the system and replace or upgrade components.

Before you open a preconfigured system to perform maintenance or upgrading, you should be sure to check with the vendor to determine whether you must use an authorized technician to perform service. If the vendor requires you to use an authorized technician and you fail to do so, you could void your warranty.