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Homebuilt 19" Mini-ITX Server Rack

Posted by timothy on from the mother-of-invention dept.

TykSak writes "I started to build this rack with Mini-ITX boards almost 3 years ago and today it holds four 3U servers with a total of 28 harddrives. I made this site to describe the process of the build."

8 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Cool, but... by drivinghighway61 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is pretty useless. The mini-itx chipsets aren't really appropriate for server usage, especially considering the weak VIA processors and the high prices for the boards. I'd much rather just set up a couple of AMD boxes for the price.

    1. Re:Cool, but... by spagetti_code · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps - depends on the application.

      If its IO bound, these may function just fine. Given they run cool (low cooling requirements), quiet and with low power usage, they may provide a good mips-per-operating-$$. They are not that cheap on a $/mips from a capex point of view though.

    2. Re:Cool, but... by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're fine, even ideal for home server usage. If you don't need the CPU power anyway (and honestly an athlon XP 2000+ is way overkill for most home servers) the power savings are nice. A file server doesn't need more than a crappy CPU and some good SCSI/SATA cards. This is especially true because the server will likely be on 24/7.

    3. Re:Cool, but... by StressedEd · · Score: 2, Insightful
      We have been looking at this for the purpose of acting as a backup server (disk space is running short). Came across a review which under due consideration I think rules it out. The application we have is for a set of redundent backup servers serving NFS backups. Since this doesn't support NFS out of the box it pretty much rules it out straight away. The lack of hot swap is also a no-no. In my opinion RAID is not much use unless you can couple that with a redundent disk which can be swapped in automatically when one fails. This is also not supported.

      That said, the one aspect of it I like is the ease of extensibility. Daisy chaining these units is quite an attractive thing.

      I have been considering some form of distrubuted storage cluster. In other words an array of machines which presents a single logical drive with redundency on a machine basis. Do people here have any experience with this (GFS et al.)? Care to comment?

      [shameless plug] In case anyone is wondering, the backup s/w is my own concontion yarbu. Which automates hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups. I've been running this for about a year with ~1TB of backup under its control, spanning about a dozen machines. It's a lifesaver (not as fancy-shmancy as some others but very reliable).

      --
      Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
  2. wasn't built recently by Snuggly_Soft · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This sweet and economical rack was built in september of 2003. The project's worklog shows that the only changes have been swapping hard drives since then. It looks like a great file/web server. It's just not that topical. I'm waiting for a water-cooled Beowulf cluster...now that would be something.

  3. Re:Actually, it is very useful by InfoTechnologist80 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Real servers can just serve out data on demand. :) This sounds like it is ideal for situation where you need to store lots of data at home.

  4. But what did it cost? by matthew.thompson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seriously if this was - Man makes own Blade server using Mini-ITX motherboards that would be damn impressive.

    Imagine having a home cluster in a really small space with hot-pluggable units.

    But this is just Man makes 4 PCs and puts hard drives in them - and spends more than if he'd bought the units anyway.

    --
    Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
  5. Re:Pretty, but... why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Maybe because you can only think in terms of how inexpensively you would do any particular task.

    The main reasons people use Via Mini-ITX is,
    * very small form factor
    * very low power consumption
    * whisper quiet

    These factors combined with the fact that many servers these days are not high traffic, makes this approach quite attractive.

    Remember alot of the work in these areas is by teenagers with computers in their bedrooms - hence the modding of systems, far beyond 'spray painting'.