Hi everyone. My first post here so first of all congrats to Jeremy on putting together such an awesome little site, I've been lurking around here for a few weeks now and it's brilliantly clear and informative :)

My question to you all is regarding the rackmount kits that Cisco kit ships with - you know, the little brackets - does anyone else find that they're severely lacking? Something doesn't seem right to me when your unit is half the depth of the rack itself, not particularly light, and you have to hang it off of one side, with no support at the back. It seems that no matter how tightly you fasten your bolts, the whole thing sags down, and I'm left wondering, is this really secure?!

I understand the reason for them being this way, that is they come from a telco rack background where you often only had two posts. Still, I think in this day and age where four-post racks are commonplace we could do better. I'm thinking sliding rails in the same style that you would mount a 1U or 2U server with, that attach to all four posts, possibly with some cable management built in... think how much neater your racks would be...!

I haven't found anywhere that sells such things. I'm wondering if 1) any of you know of some place that does? and 2) if they don't exist, would you want them to; would you buy them? I'm tempted to get cracking on it myself with CAD, it doesn't seem like a difficult engineering problem!

In the datacenter I work in we use the stock rack mount kits from Cisco on everything from the 3500 chassis up to the 6500's in 4-post cabinets. Never had a problem with the stock rack mount "flanges" not holding the weight of the unit(s).

While I've never seen extending rail kits like you're looking for on Cisco gear, I can make a recommendation on shelving. We utilize "Zero-RU" shelving; That is shelves that do not invade into adjacent space vertically. Every RU is a sellable space in most of our cabinets, so we're loathe to waste it on shelving.

Using these shelves we can mount large switches w/o mounting flanges and the "standard" cisco cable management pieces usually attach fine as well.

We use the below shelving from rackmountgears.com; http://www.rackmountgears.com/product_info.php?products_id=20

love,
shmoo

PS- wtf is a "Jeremy"?