Rethinking the rack

Telecommunications Americas, April, 2004 by Sue O'Keefe

Remember the erector sets you had as a kid? You know, there were three or four standard pieces, and with them you could build everything from a 1/400 scale of the Eiffel Tower to an airplane. Move that concept to the telecom space, and you've got a company set on changing the way telco equipment is housed.

Indiana-based RackFrame is about a year old, but its parent company, Star Case Manufacturing, has been building packaging for sophisticated electronics equipment since 1975. It wasn't too much of a stretch to transfer that know-how to telecom racks, and RackFrame (www.rackframe.com) was born.

Anyone who has purchased racks knows how expensive, heavy and confining they can be in terms of sizes. When it set out to build the perfect rack, RackFrame had a few goals in mind: cost-effective, modular, simple, lightweight, yet carrier-class. The result was a solution made of three standard pieces (rail, corner and fastener) that can assemble to more than 79,000 different configurations. The racks come in 172 pre-packaged kits of the most popular configurations or can be customized to any width, depth and height.

Key to the RackFrame product is a patent-pending corner flange that follows the same hole patterns as the rail spacing, allowing three pieces to be attached to form a cube. Any time a rail needs to be cut down by 1 3/4-inch (one rack unit) increments, it would still fit within the connecting corner. Fastening the pieces together are Phillips head screws, allowing for simple assembly. The result: A single rack of any size can be assembled in about 15 minutes by a novice.

President Dennis Toma tells of a customer at a recent trade show that thought one of the demos was neat. When he heard the price--under $200--he gasped and told the story of his last rack purchase, which arrived on a pallet that required more than a little help getting to his second-story set-up, cost more than 10 times the price and subsequently required fans and exhaust systems to be added.

The word is spreading, Toma says. "We've had people call us up and order one," he says. "Then they call us back a few weeks later and buy a whole roomful."

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