Last week I have been doodling how the new case would work. Still an outgoing project to decide what and how to build it.

The Optiplex cases are pretty neat,  they stack on each other, they have a good ventilation system and can be placed vertically or horizontally. They are not easy to replace because in the first place you may not need to do so. This project started with the need of building something, so reusing the cases is  out of the equation: sorry to all those dell engineers that did such a great job squeezing all this components in 24x24x7 (specially to that one guy who cut a square off the motherboard to fit the system fan).

The collective arrangement presents new challenges that were never addressed in the original case. Like for example hiding all the wiring that feeds the nodes. Reducing the size of all this 220 Volts power cords into some other system that feeds all the nodes would be pretty nice to have as well. Talking about power cords... I would had never though that those are such an expensive thing. If this is  because the price of copper, I could resell the copper cooler pipes if this project does not work out and maybe break even.

The solution for the power distribution currently looks like: