The rack is a $40 Amazon shelf and I refuse to apologize
The “rack” is a boltless steel shelf from Amazon, the kind meant for paint cans and storage tubs.
On it: six tower nodes, all running Proxmox, doing everything from LLM inference to Kubernetes pools, plus flash storage.
The whole thing is tied together with a $50 1G switch (I promise I’ll upgrade the fabric soon).
Things I swore were temporary: the wood framing, the cable management, the switch, the shelf itself. The shelf is winning. It’s load-bearing infrastructure now.
It honestly works. Boltless shelving handles way more weight than people assume, and tower chassis don’t need rails. The real problems are airflow and cable management, both of which the photo will confirm I have not solved.
So before I spend real money: know any better ways to store these? Towers, not rackmount, so a standard 19” rack is out unless I shelf-mount them anyway. Open to wall mounts, custom builds, “just buy X,” or being told the shelf is fine and I should stop overthinking it.