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RLX Gets Denser

Posted by Hemos on from the smaller-and-smaller-it-goes dept.

A reader writes: "There's story about RLX Technologies shrinking their "blades" server on Linuxgram." Knowing how much we pay for our "floor space" at the colo, the notion of having multiple blade machines is pretty cool - and shrinking this to a 1U form factor with 6 blade of the Transmeta Crusoe 5800 line of chip is pretty cool.

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. What about total power? by dave-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nifty that Transmeta's finally (belatedly?) living up to its hype by showing that they can stack mo' CPUs into a smaller space as they run so much cooler... but how much computing power (bus bandwidth and everything) does a Transmeta have when compared to an Intel/Sun/whoever solution? Does it stack (no pun intended) up?

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  2. Saving floor space won't necessarily save money by maladroit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Knowing how much we pay for our "floor space" at the colo, the notion of having multiple blade machines is pretty cool.

    But a soon as everyone starts using less floor space, the colo will need to increase the price per unit of floor space - floor space is often used as an accounting allocation unit, with the tough-to-measure costs, like power, ac use, security, and some personnel costs split by floor and rack space. Those costs aren't going away - they will need to be split among a smaller number of units. (Not to mention in the non-expansion dot.bomb era, the capital used for the building is pretty much a sunk cost).

  3. Is this actually useful? by uslinux.net · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is shrinking equipment like this actually useful to most companies? I'm curious, because my prior employer, had lots of rack space, but the colo site only had ~20amps per rack available. With 9' racks, it was very easy to run out of power BEFORE space was an issue. They (above.net) claimed their colo was designed for 6-8U "servers", not 1U "pizza boxes".

    Aside from power, how about heat dissapation? After all, a bunch of laptops theoretically would make EXCELLENT servers, since they even have 1-2 hour battery backups built right in, are extra small, and don't even require a KVM (they could just be pulled out as needed). BUT, a laptop runs waaaaaaay too hot to be used as a server, and their price/performance ratio is aweful, even if you do save on rack space.

    Finally, do these have any redundancy built in? Is there anything else special about them? Personally, I'd rather have a 1U rack unit which is dual CPU, dual NIC, and dual power supply than two of these. It would probably be cheaper, last longer, and be less hassle.

    Just my $0.02 from my past colo experience.