For some time our engineers have been watching the exploding market for Intel NUC mini PCs. As most manufacturers jump on band wagon to develop smaller and more interesting ways to house this really quite simple board, G2 has been considering a different angle.
We have very successfully designed and manufactured ultra compact rack mounted PCs to a small market share, all the while Dell, IBM, HP, etc dominate their respective market with server solutions. So the question was; Does Intel NUC fit in a rack mount PC case, and what is the point?
The primary USP of NUC is size so what if more than one unit would fit in the space of one normal rack PC. It may seem unnecessary to some users but rack space is becoming a premium, virtualization on VMware/Citrix is common place and flexible resilient expandable systems are a big consideration.
However, there are some pre-conceptions of rack mounted hardware that need to be fulfilled. An internal power supply, no problem, Intel has usefully included an internal DC input just for this purpose. Storage space because the primary mini PCIe slot for an mSSD is not cost effective way to get storage space. Now that the Haswell NUCs have a SATA connector we can also integrate a 2.5″ HDD bay so customers can fit conventional spinning head drives.
There should also be consideration for RS-232/Serial Ports, DVD drive bay and more USB ports but we have to start somewhere, and we did.
