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Portables as Servers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the today's-portables-are-yesterday's-servers dept.

vincecate asks: "Do portables make reliable Linux servers? The power on the island where I live is very unreliable. With the screen off the battery should last through a long power outage. I could even put on a UPS and have it last a day. My servers have little load (DNS and some web). Prices on portables are getting reasonable. Can anyone report on using portables as servers?"

1 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Laptop as Servers??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Ok, so you have a laptop running as a server and it works for you. Does that mean that I should rip out all my quad processor servers and my SAN and all these SCSI disks and replace them with a laptop? I guess if I used VMWare, I could put em all on a single laptop!

    I know I'm coming off as rude and I'm sorry but, let's be realistic. How about some facts and some numbers? How much data are we talking about and how fast does it need to be processed and moved about? How many people will be creating and accessing this data? You mention a SQL database. Is it performing 2,000 transactions per second or is it doing two transactions per day? Is a single 2.5 inch EIDE hard drive really up to the task? Does such a drive have enough space, speed, reliability? Or are you counting on some USB drive that's daisy chained off the laptop? Can an Intel mobile processor really match a quad Xeon processor server?

    If you think your running a l33t server on a laptop because you managed to get Apache to serve the default page, that's great. But, most of the world wouldn't really regard your toaster's capabilities as being a server.

    Some people may be able to argue the merits of SATA versus SCSI but, laptops aren't servers and no one can argue that!