Pimp My Server!

One of the toughest yet pleasurable issues we faced with launching ‘The MatrixStore’ was branding and the associated costs of producing custom faceplates. The cost of going through established vendors of such services seemed disproportionate but the main issue was that the vendors were too remote to have a truly consultative process.

We knew roughly what we wanted in terms of design and functionally what the faceplate should achieve.

So we decided to go local. There is a diminishing pool of design & engineering talent here in the UK in terms of manufacturing. Luckily there are still enough companies and people  out there (for now) with the skills and desire to assist companies like ourselves in producing an amazing quality product. One such  person is my old dad (he is too modest to say it but he and his team are the kings of bespoke engineering).

Given a rough spec and a choice of producing a fancy bling version and a more conservative black face plate he gave us the following prototypes:

Henry Ford Black

Or Bling

(Excuse the reflection! Its hard to take a photo of a mirror finish!)

As you will see from our website ‘www.thematrixstore.com’ we went for bling… and boy does it look good in a rack:

From taking the servers down to his factory in Bridgend to the finished face plates we have today took a little over 2 weeks in actual effort which included custom fittings to ensure the faceplates stay in place and are easily removed. I will post some images of the process another day.. especially the laser work on the logo..

The only problem with the super shiney stainless steel finish is that people just can’t stop polishing them! They just can’t help themselves.

So big thank you to the following people:

Dad (Customised sheet Metal)

Owain, Jonathan, Richard and Steve (Customised sheet Metal)