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UCoustic™ Customer Comments

Tune Up Media

I forget how noisy my office used to be, filled as it was with the white noise hum of 15 rack units' worth of switches, firewall, servers, 4-node NAS and UPS. I forget, that is, until I opened the front and back doors to the Ucoustic 9210 Active Cabinet during a routine server maintenance window.

When I chose the Ucoustic cabinet, it was after a couple weeks of assessing the options of every possible sound-reduction cabinet vendor, and also after calculating the thermal output (about 12K BTU/hour) and 85+ dB of noise generated by my equipment. My office is in an open, warehouse-style building with 20-foot ceilings, made to amplify noise from my previous open equipment rack, so noise reduction was the first problem I had to solve. Second on the list was concern that a noise-reducing cabinet would have adequate ventilation, especially lacking forced-cooling in our environment, but tempered by moderate San Francisco weather.

We were immediately surprised with the noise reduction -- from 85+ dB mentioned above to 65 dB when standing next to the cabinet.

Cooling inside the cabinet proved to be tricky until I placed the temperature gauge in the Ucoustic near the ceiling of my cabinet. As this gaugeregulates the speed of the fans on the rear doors of the Ucoustic, it signals the fans to rotate faster when higher temperatures are detected.

Overall I've been satisfied with the noise reduction and cooling provided by the Ucoustic and feel it was the best solution for my problems.

Julie Russell

National Board of Chiropractic Examiners

David,

It has been crazy around here. I just wanted to touch base with you. We received the replacement panel. It looks great.

We have the systems in the rack and running. It is working better than expected. The noise is reduced more than I imagined. The internal core temperature of the servers is on average 5 degrees cooler than before. The room temperature is now easily maintained at a comfortable 70 degrees.
We had to be a little creative with cable management at the back of the servers because the cable management arms, that allow the servers to slide in an out, did not fit with the thickness of the back doors. We were able to accomplish this with some cable management wraps.

Overall we are very pleased. Feel free to pass this information along to others that are thinking of purchasing. If you would like I could also send some pictures of the rack.

We are actually considering the smaller, half-rack, size for our network switches. Could you send me a quote for that? I will also need a spec sheet so I can see if they will work for us as well.

Thanks again
Tony Golobic
IT HELPDESK

Tango Networks Inc. - TX - Update 30 days later Here's an update 30 days after the install: We have six rows of cubicles in our Engineering area. I have one UCoustic24U cabinet in a cubicle in each row. They fit nicely behind the cubicle walls and are hardly noticeable. We have populated the racks even more densely than I previously reported: 23u with doors closed and no heat problems. Our office is a very large open floor and very few walls (air circulates well) and ambient temp is about 69 degree F.

Tango Networks Inc. - TX

Testing results: We populated the cabinet with 12 servers, dual core processors running at 75% load (high transaction rate) and experienced no temperature issues and very dramatic noise reduction (specifically at the higher frequencies which are noticeable by humans). We continued adding servers and eventually populated to 24 U (total of 20 servers = 18 1U servers + 2 2U servers), dual core processors running at 75% load (high transaction rate) and experienced a higher temperature than we wanted (i.e. the temperature was higher than we liked but still we had no server failures). We did notice that by leaving the back doors slightly opened the temperatures fell back down to a tolerable range with only a slight increase in noise levels (i.e. leaving the back door cracked open still dropped the noise levels considerably).

Comparison to competition: We believe that your product stacks up very favorably against others that we reviewed. The Rackmount Solutions cabinet is cheaper, dissipates more heat, and suppresses more sound.

Chuck Derrick

Young and Franklin - NY

Prior to installing the new rack we tested the sound levels at different locations in the room that housed the old rack. We finally had time to take down the network this past Saturday and we moved our equipment into the new rack and then powered on all the servers, switches and disk drives. I was concerned that it was so quiet that maybe we would have temperature problems. So we left the front and back doors open as I wanted to be onsite to have them closed so I could monitor the temps.

On Monday we took a temp reading and then closed the doors. The temperature actually dropped with the airflow that your cabinet produces. We had our maintenance department come in and take some sound level readings like they did prior and we found dBa drops of 6-9 at the various locations. We are very happy with the sound levels and that's why we ordered one more cabinet, the smaller 24u as we have two more devices to put in and then we'll have an office that will offer the same sound levels as a normal office sitting.

Although I am busy I do not mind a phone call from a prospective customer if you are in a sales situation and they are questioning results that they may incur. But keep the phone number off the web.

We are happy!

Regards,
Jim Marr

Bill Wyman, Seven-Tel Systems, Inc., University of Colorado as sent to University IT staff.

Hi All—

If you have not done so already, please do stop by Room 1B 20 and check out the new Ucoustic server enclosure. After I moved all of the equipment into it and closed it up last evening, it was so quiet that the sound generated by the room air-handling system and the fans of the student desktop systems in the room was clearly audible. Acoustically, it performs as advertised.

Thermally, this thing looks like magic to me. The UPS, which was operating at an internal temperature of about 85 degrees at its old location (outside of and behind the old server cabinet), is operating this morning at 74 degrees in its new location (inside the enclosure along with both servers which are running). Yet the server enclosure includes no cooling system—no pump or liquid coolant or coils—just two ordinary, thermostatically controlled muffin-type fans.

Maybe an engineer can explain it.

Cheers,

Bill

Bill had more to say when we said thank you for his comments...

Hi Tim,

Your reply is speedy. Feel free to use my comments on your website, including the ones in this email. ... I am knowingly--and happily--inviting visitors to your site to figure out how to contact me. No problem with that at all.

Every now and then a product comes along . . .

I’ll add that before I purchased the Ucoustic, I described its properties, as you and the owner’s manual had explained them, to a facilities engineer in the College of Engineering who has a good 30 years experience dealing with electrical, electronic, and computer equipment of all kinds. He was willing to take the noise-reduction claims at face value. When I went on to describe the thermal-reduction and regulation claims, he got very quiet, and then said: “I don’t see how that is possible.” I didn’t either. I still don’t, but the Ucoustic does indeed do what the specs say it will do.

The College of Engineering has been wrestling for 3 years with how to provide a large, traditional, climate-controlled room for servers—a shared facility which could house the many servers owned by its dozen or so departments and programs. “There’s not enough space for all the server rooms we need, so let’s pool our resources (or the lack thereof) and get the College to do it.” Great idea, but then come even bigger problems: the unavailability of a very large space in already overcrowded buildings, renovation costs, capital equipment costs, energy costs, maintenance and upkeep costs, along with all the issues involved in administering any shared facility: authority, responsibility, security, access, recurring user fees, and on and on. I will offer to show anybody the Ucoustic, and let it speak for itself.

Bill Wyman.

PC and MacExchange

"My client, a Technology Director for a school district, ordered 2 Ucoustic Soundproof Server Cabinets. His office had 2 large enclosed racks with 9 servers each in them. The constant server noise made for a terrible working environment. Every phone conversation sounded like a small airport was nearby. After installing the Ucoustic cabinets, this Technology Director is extremely happy and is now working in a quiet office environment. It's amazing, not only were the servers quiet, but he measured the heat inside the rack at 76 degrees, while his office was 85 degrees. I have no hesitation recommending Ucoustic Soundproof Server Cabinets to any of my clients."

Dennis Laing
PC and MacExchange
Senior Account Manager