What with rack servers getting louder with each generation, Tom Yager considers noise to be the primary governor of his workflow.“There are things that I set out to save: My ears and my power draw,” Yager explains in It’s quiet, it’s green, it’s the rack o’ my dreams. That brought him to GizMac and its XRackPro2 which is not a sound-isolating cabinet but, rather, a sealed rack enclosure that reduces noise, as Yager found, with varying effectiveness depending on what’s generated inside. “I packed an 8-core Xserve and two 16-core machines in a 6U XRackPro2. When I powered them all up, the noise was so overwhelming as to make a telephone call impossible from anywhere in the room. Until, that is, I shut XRackPro2’s foam-sealed front and back doors,” Yager explains. While XRackPro2 “by itself isn’t enough,” it was sufficient that Yager turned his eye toward power management and DataProbe’s iBootBar rack power monitor/controller, which helps with all but a few small issues. Technology Industry