The store room
An inventory of spares and orders to design with.
What it is
The store room is the list of devices that exist or are planned but are not in a rack yet: servers on order, spares on a shelf, hardware set aside for a particular rack. Open it from the Store room tab in the workspace rail (or press 5). It is a planning aid for a design, not asset management, so it has no locations, movements or audit trail. It is free on every plan, and holds up to 5,000 lines per project.
A line is one device type with a quantity, and optionally a label, serial number, asset tag, supplier, order reference, expected date, tags and notes. Its status is In store, Reserved (earmarked for a rack or space) or On order. A serial number belongs to one physical unit, so a line with a serial has a quantity of 1; type a serial against a line of several and Railyard offers to split one unit off.
Adding and editing
Add item uses the same device type search as a rack: the NetBox catalogue, your organisation's types, the project's own types or a custom type. The type is copied into the project with the item, so exports stay self-contained. The table reads as text: change a quantity with its − and + buttons and a status from its menu, click a serial, supplier, date or label to edit it (Enter saves, Escape cancels), or select a row to open its details beside the table, where every field lives, including role, colour and power draw. Use the checkboxes to set the status of, or remove, several items at once.
The Where filter above the table switches its rows between the Store room, In racks (every racked device, read-only, with a Show in rack link) and Everything. Columns, search, sort and the buttons stay where they are; only the rows change. Search matches every column, the status chips (In rack, In store, Reserved, On order) count what is in view, and the filter, search and sort are kept in the page address, so refreshing or going back keeps them. Add item and Import CSV add to the store room, so they wait while you are looking at racks. Export CSV downloads what the table currently shows; in the store room that is a file the importer reads back. The estate tree starts folded away here; the Tree button in the rail brings it back.
Import CSV takes a pasted table or a file. Headers are matched by name, so Model, Qty, Serial, Asset tag, Supplier, PO, Status and Expected all work, and dates can be written 30/11/2026 or 2026-11-30. A device type that is not in the project yet is looked up in the catalogue: an exact match by model, part number or name is offered for adding, together with the items, and anything else stays an error you can answer with a custom type. A preview shows every row, with its problems, before anything changes: rows with errors are left out and the rest are added as one undo step.
Import CSV takes a pasted table or a file. Headers are matched by name, so Model, Qty, Serial, Asset tag, Supplier, PO, Status and Expected all work, and dates can be written 30/11/2026 or 2026-11-30. A preview shows every row, with its problems, before anything changes: rows with errors are left out and the rest are added as one undo step. Device types must already be in the project's library.
Placing and returning devices
Place in rack… on a row chooses the rack, face and unit; only units that are really free are offered. From a rack, use From store room… in the rack details, or right-click an empty unit and choose Place from store room. One unit moves each time: a line of several loses one, and a single unit leaves the store room. The device keeps the item's label, serial, notes, tags, colour, role and power draw; with no label, the rack's device naming names it.
To send a device back, choose Return to store room in its details or its menu. Its cables and power connections are removed, exactly as when a device is deleted, and the toast says how many. Identical units join one line; a device with a serial gets a line of its own. Position, face, custom ports and custom power inputs are not kept. Every move is a single undo step.
The NetBox and Nautobot exports can include the store room as devices with no rack (see Export). Deleting a rack or space that items were reserved for clears those reservations, in the same undo step. The design review has a Store room section: how many units are still unplaced, items reserved but not racked, and ordered items whose expected date has passed.