Data Center In a Shoe Box

eldavojohn writes "How would you like to have a data center that uses just 14.5 watts and weighs 255g? It's also only as big as a shoe box! The Register looks at a few solutions to network area storage that make buying a dedicated data server on a rack look like a relic of the past. Yes, it runs Linux."

Comments

Ogg Support???

[netsavior]

Yes, it runs Linux.

yeah but I doubt it can play Ogg files.

I for one welcome our shoebox dwelling data overlords.

Re:Ogg Support???

[xyph0r]

It doesn't have support out of the shoebox, but it is upgradeable.

Re:Ogg Support???

[eebra82]

yeah but I doubt it can play Ogg files. It runs on a 400 MHz AMD/Raza MIPS chip. You can certainly play ogg files, but the lack of a sound card is probably going to make it into a pointless mission.

Re:Ogg Support???

[kitgerrits]

Seeing as it has USB, I'm pretty sure you can plug a $5 USB soundcard into it.

But can it make toast?

Re:Ogg Support???

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but I doubt it can play Ogg files. The question is if it has Ugg support.

Re:Ogg Support???

[kitgerrits]

About sound:
http://www.plathome.com/products/microserver/oms/faq.html#faq-367

Seeing as the device is supported by Debian and netbsd,
    you can probably 'emerge' a Ogg support package and player.

Re:Ogg Support???

[Anonymous Coward]

But Alix can: http://www.pcengines.ch/ ...then again, if You are interested in such devices, You already know that...

Re:Ogg Support???

[Hasmanean]

You stupid nerds! It's a server, it's meant to generate and stream ogg files, not to play them.! ;)

Re:Ogg Support???

[raddan]

Just as a point of reference, I have a Soekris net4801-60 connected to a USB-audio adapter, PCI USB2 card and external USB hard disk, and this machine plays MP3s just fine. It was a little bit of a gamble when I purchased the hardware, since I did not know if it was fast enough, but I did some tests using mpg123 on a similar machine (AMD K6) and it handled MP3 playback just fine. I briefly thought I was in trouble when I discovered that the USB-audio device could only playback audio at 48KHz, but surprisingly, the Soekris is fast enough even to upsample 44KHz to 48KHz and play it back. It works well as long as I don't do big network transfers while I am playing music. BTW, the box runs OpenBSD, not Linux-- more out of familiarity on my part than technical merit. We're talking about a 586-class machine here, so I suspect that the machines in the article will do MP3 playback just fine. Ogg, I don't know-- I don't use it.

Re:Ogg Support???

[Anonymous Coward]

re 'emerge'

That's Gentoo actually =)

Re:Ogg Support???

[dfranks]

The Alix series is definately worth checking out. We use their 2c2 board in our STACS field communications device that provides a VOIP switch, EV-DO, dual (WAN and LAN) 802.11g WiFi, INMARSAT BGAN satellite terminal, radio interface, GPS in an IP65 weatherproof, dustproof case at under 14 lbs. And that includes a SLA battery good for around 10 hours of operation. There is another processor on board, but the Alix provides the linux hub that drives the entire device and makes normal operation completely automatic (just turn it on and browse/call/etc). Dean dfranks -at- solomontech.com

Re:Ogg Support???

[pwizard2]

yeah but I doubt it can play Ogg files.

Well, it can certainly stream them to a computer that can.

Re:Ogg Support???

[aproposofwhat]

If it's Gentoo, it's more likely 'evolve', on a geological timescale ;o)

AppleTV

[clare-ents]

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/appletvdedicated.html

15-20W, 1Ghz Core Solo, 256MB RAM, 40GB disk, already plugged in, masterswitched and ready to go.

disclaimer: I'm one of the company founders.

Re:AppleTV

[h4rr4r]

40GB disc? So 10 shows is about it, that seems like a real problem.

Re:AppleTV

[clare-ents]

If you watch TV shows when you're sat in the data centre I guess is might be. If you're after a cheap dedicated linux server (and *lots* of people are) good luck finding something cheaper.

Re:AppleTV

[beelsebob]

1) It's in a data centre. 2) The AppleTV just caches shows on it's disk, it can stream from iTunes on your computer too.

Re:AppleTV

[prennix]

hmmm, cheaper is relative. I don't see where I can order one very easily. Seems like we would almost need to 'apply' to order 1 (or 20)?

Re:AppleTV

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see where I can order one

They're hosting them at their data center.

Re:AppleTV

[prennix]

They're hosting them at their data center. so the size is completely irrelevant... seems like non news, as it doesn't seem to be "on sale" as the FA would suggest...

Re:AppleTV

[billcopc]

Wait a minute...

You're leasing these out as servers ? Why would anyone want to pay those prices for an ultra-low capacity server ? What kind of clientele do you have ?

I know there are some ridiculously overpriced hosts out there and you're certainly not one of them, but I fail to see how buying cheap Apple machines can be more cost-effective than low-end PC hardware. I've built tons of micro-servers around Intel E2180 (2ghz dual) processors, with power consumption between 40 and 80 watts (peak), and they fit in a half-width 1U slab (outboard PSU). Cost ? About the same as your Apple TV, only it has 4 times the processing power and 2gb of Ram.

If the client's needs are less than what the dedicated box provides, that's what shared hosting is for... hell even a dozen VMs on a big rig would be a more cost-effective and power-wise approach than a beowulf cluster of Apple.

Re:AppleTV

[radish]

Seriously? OK, how about this, or this or this. Most of these deals are for considerably better hardware/bandwidth too - as well as being cheaper.

Re:AppleTV

[Aldenissin]

Hmm.. I wonder what is the recommended decent specs are for a Counter Strike Source server.. and what kind of bandwidth a popular server would pull a month. Could it be possibly cheaper to rent a dedicated box and run the servers yourself? Or would you have to have several servers to make it worthwhile?

Re:AppleTV

[clare-ents]

If you want to colocate in one of the major London data centres you get 2kW per rack. So that's 25 micro-servers you suggested, 50 Mac Minis or 100 AppleTVs.

The 2Ghz/2GB Mac Mini may cost more to buy than the micro server you've built but it halves your rackspace cost. Believe me, rackspace in London is not cheap.

If you can build a 1/2U server, with a Core 2, 2GB, hardware RAID and a power consumption of 60W under load, we're interested.

Re:AppleTV

[JAlexoi]

You didn't look into just buying a bunch of mini embedded systems?
Just take a look at Via DP-310. There are a lot of small systems manufacturers, and even more cost effective as Apple's stuff.

Re:AppleTV

[TheRaven64]

For comparison, I am paying $50/month to these guys for a colocated Mac Mini with 100GB of transfer per month 2 IPs, and great support. Mine is the PowerPC model and runs OpenBSD.

Re:AppleTV

[clare-ents]

Sure, we're £400/year inc VAT for Mac Mini colo with 100GB of traffic, which ex VAT and in dollars is about $670 / year. It's slightly higher but not much.

The AppleTV is about the same speed as a PowerPC Mini, comes in at ~ $580 with 100GB which includes the hardware.

I don't think there's a cheaper UK based dedicated server, but I could be wrong. US servers are cheaper because the dollar is 'competitively' priced. The 200ms ping time makes them less desirable to those of us in Europe though.

Re:AppleTV

[TheRaven64]

The AppleTV is about the same speed as a PowerPC Mini, comes in at ~ $580 with 100GB which includes the hardware. Your price for the AppleTV on the site you link to is £35/month, which is $70 at the current exchange rate - 40% more. Including the hardware is a good point, however my Mini is now three years old and so works out at about $15/month for the price I paid for it (it has an 80GB disk and 512MB of RAM - not sure how much you charge for a similarly upgraded AppleTV), and they will ship it to me when I stop hosting it with them. Looking at your co-lo prices for a Mac Mini, it seems you charge around £40 for roughly the same service I pay $50 for.

I don't think there's a cheaper UK based dedicated server, but I could be wrong. US servers are cheaper because the dollar is 'competitively' priced. The 200ms ping time makes them less desirable to those of us in Europe though. Oh, I don't doubt it. I looked for a UK-based hosting company before going with these guys, and keep looking around, but 200ms (actually, RTT from here is 158ms, while RTT to bbc.co.uk is 8ms) just isn't worth paying almost twice as much. Datacentre space in London seems to be significantly more expensive than outside, but there are a couple of Welsh hosting companies that look like they might start to be competitive soon. I'll keep an eye on your service though, and see if you're more competitive in a year's time (or when my Mini dies, whichever is sooner). I'd also be interested if you could fit a second hard drive in in place of the Mini's DVD drive and run a RAID-1 configuration.

Re:AppleTV

[clare-ents]

£35 = $70. The Americans have a massive competitive advantage, they have a cheap currency and they don't charge VAT. ex VAT annually it's £297.87 which works out at $49/month.

It's fair to say we charge a slight premium for our hosting, after all we figured out many of the issues in making Linux on the Mac Mini and AppleTV go,

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/macmini/

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/

We also install ncad by default - it's an ssh server that starts up before fsck in the boot process so you can recover from disk screwups / watch the lengthy fsck of your machine. We wrote that too (although before we started the company).

You might also be interested in the netboot recovery stuff we've got assuming you're a linux user. We could probably lower our monthly fees by making everything a chargeable extra, but we think that remote reboot, netboot recovery, secondary DNS, reverse dns, required IP addresses, basic SMS monitoring should all be included in the base price. We'd rather sell a decent service at a reasonable price, that sell the base service at or below cost and stick it to the customers with every extra thing they ask for.

Re:AppleTV

[billcopc]

Thanks for clarifying. I find that power allocation terribly low. We are talking about a full, 42U rack, yes ?

I've rarely seen a respectable 1U slab consume less than 100W, with the 8-core 4Us devouring close to 400W on a busy day. Mind you, I'm in Canada where hydro power is relatively cheap. I guess they do things differently in your neck of the woods.

Re:AppleTV

[clare-ents]

47U yes.

Our experience is if you try hard you can get a 1U machine on about 120W. The issue is all the data centres with decent connectivity are in East London where they're about to build the Olympics and I believe that planning permission for buildings with a high current draw won't be granted. Consequently for anything better you have to move out of London which means getting screwed on the fibre costs.

Data center at 5400

[iamhigh]

Right, just what I want... a data center full of laptop hard drives running at 5400 RPM.

I wouldn't even want that bottleneck at home.

Re:Data center at 5400

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, but could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things?

Re:Data center at 5400

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

all this time, I thought beowulf was dead. Thanks for resurecting that meme!

Re:Data center at 5400

[gbjbaanb]

a datacentre with a 5400rpm HDD would be a bad thing, but .. a 20-drive RAID5 array would not be so bad.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I know more spindles = better performance, and you could fit a lot more little drives into an enclosure than the relatively large 3.5" drives, so perhaps the overall performance would be better.

I guess, in the end, you don't get 2.5" drives in SCSI flavour so its a bit pointless. the only good thing about 2.5" drives is that you can put them in an USB caddy without needing a power brick.

Re:Data center at 5400

[tattood]

I think you are right about this. The smaller drive has the data packed more tightly, so even at 5400 RPM, the data transfer rate is still pretty good.

I saw a SATA/SAS backplane unit at Fry's that looked pretty cool. It was a hot-swappable drive bay that holds 4 2.5" drives in a single 5 1/4" drive bay. You could get a lot of drives packed in a server that way.

Re:Data center at 5400

[JayAEU]

I'm not so sure about that. These 2.5" drives have a lot going for them, they need less power and thus produce less heat, not to mention that they're a lot smaller and take up less space.

I put eight 250GB drives in 2 of these babies http://www.snt.com.tw/product.php?mode=show&pid=82 and hooked them up with 2 Promise TX4-SATA300 controllers in a headless AMD BE2350 powered PC as a RAID6/LVM config using Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.

This way I get around 1.5TB of *fast* and *quiet* fully networked storage. If one drive fails I just pop in a new one and resync it, no sweat.

Re:Data center at 5400

[gbjbaanb]

I remember 5.25" drives, lol. That's an interesting unit - send a link if you have one. RAID5 performance over 4 'slow' drives would not be the best, but then a 4-drive RAID5 array can be damn slow anyway. If you used it for backups... you'd still want the capacity of larger drives, but it still seems a cool little unit.

Re:Data center at 5400

[TClevenger]

HP has started to move that way with their servers. Currently you can get hotplug 2.5" SAS drives in 36GB and 72GB sizes at 15,000 RPM, and larger at 10,000 RPM.

Not even close to a data center

[h4rr4r]

Heck, not even close to a server or a SAN/NAS. 1TB of storage and a 266Mhz cpu mean that you would need a real data center full of these shoeboxes to get any real work done.

Smart boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been thinking of setting up such shoe box server. It would be nice to have ftp, and maybe bittorrent, running without too much noise or heat. And saving the planet too, since it would cut down my carbon footprint.

Re:Smart boxes

[Nursie]

Funny mod? Oh well.

May I recommend a Linksys NSLU2?

266 MHz Arm chip. Not the fastest thing in the world, but you can install a full debian system onto it. I have one running torrentflux-b4rt over lighttpd. It also runs ushare so that the Xbox 360 (or other UPnP device) can stream the media. It also runs samba, which I expose via SSH so I can listen to my music from work.

Downsides -
It's slow. Real slow. Install and update of packages through the debian system, takes AGES.
If you're unlucky you'll get one that runs at 133 MHz and have to de-solder or cut through a resistor to get it up to full speed (quite easy really)

Upsides -
The only noise is the hard disk caddy and disk you choose.
You can leave it on all the time and it won't bump up your electricity bill by much.

Re:Smart boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, just buy a DLink DNS-323, fun_plugs let you put either ctorrent or mldonkey on it. That's what I run that way I can power off my machines at night and only my NAS is running.

Re:Smart boxes

[TClevenger]

I found a cheap 1.7GHz Pentium-M Dell laptop with a broken screen on eBay. I put in a larger drive (5400 RPM, since I didn't need the extra noise or heat), and now I have a nice Linux box that draws 13-14 watts at idle, cranks up to 1.7GHz when needed, and has a built-in 2 hour UPS. It runs a completely stock x86 version of CentOS, so no worries about recompiling anything. Since it only actually does work for 4-5 hours a day, I set noatime so the drive would spin down when not in use, leaving the machine nearly silent.

Anybody know

[Xaoswolf]

the cost of one of these things? It says that they are onsale, but I didn't see any pricing information anywhere...

Re:Anybody know

[Monkey]

If the 1 TB storage device intended to be used with this thing at $699 is any indication of cost , it's probably not cheap. At that price, cost savings on power consumption are insignificant compared to the savings that would be gained through simply purchasing commodity hardware.

Even smaller servers

[miller60]

Those are pretty compact. A little while ago the Tzywen blog featured a number of novelty micro-servers that make the Plat'Home servers look like heavyweights.

Then there's an oldie but goodie: the World's Lowest Power Web Server, running on a single AAA battery and a bank of potatoes.

Re:Even smaller servers

[Anonymous Coward]

But not as small as the goatse server!

Re:Even smaller servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Now the World's Lowest Power Web Server has been slashdotted. They might even have to change the battery.

Re:Even smaller servers

[jd]

Some time back, Slashdot ran a story on a server that was the size of a Russian matchbox, although storage space was somewhat limited and it was Slashdotted even quicker than most. As for the server the Register is talking about, the speed is deceptive as the MIPS is a RISC architecture and runs faster than the pure clock rating would imply. I'm guessing it's a 32-bit MIPS, though. (I could look up the specs, but it was painful enough reading the article.)

Re:Even smaller servers

[Chris Mattern]

Some time back, Slashdot ran a story on a server that was the size of a Russian matchbox

"Russian matchbox"? Do Russians use matches of unusal size or something?

Re:Even smaller servers

[Anonymous Coward]

the World's Lowest Power Web Server, running on a single AAA battery and a bank of potatoes. You forgot one of the key features. If your web server stops serving up pages because it's fried, you can just serve it up as french fries. Try doing that with anything from IBM!! Recycling at it's best!

Re:Even smaller servers

[bhima]

Yes, but they are a DIN norm. Unfortunately American & British matchboxes are entirely different sizes and are not standards... which is why they keeping using the old standards of bread boxes, Rhode Islands, and Libraries of Congress. Why the hell The Register is using the non standard size of a "shoe box" is beyond me... I guess it just goes to show their shoddy journalism.

Re:Even smaller servers

[jsiren]

print "It's a matchbox"; while(true) { print " that contains a matchbox"; }

Re:Even smaller servers

[stefanlasiewski]

Do Russians use matches of unusal size or something?

The third terror of the Fire Swamp.

"Matches Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."

Re:Even smaller servers

[Nyckname]

Then there's an oldie but goodie: the World's Lowest Power Web Server, running on a single AAA battery and a bank of potatoes. Great. First ethanol and biodiesel, now the internet running up food prices.

Are they serious?

[Uncle Focker]

At 700 dollars and only 1 TB of storage? Pffffft. I'll pass.

Who is this meant for?

[AmonEzhno]

This seems kind of gimmicky. The price point makes it unlikely that any home users will purchase it when it is cheaper to buy a usb harddrive, but the form factor and hardware make it impractical for an enterprise setting where it doesn't make any real sense in a large distributed network.

Though I suppose it could be good for a small office setting with file sharing needs...

So theres that..

Re:Who is this meant for?

[iamhigh]

Yep. they tried to please all, and will likely sell next to none of these. the only thing I can think of is in a industrial setting. But there are already a few strong contenders in this market (little pc, for one). And it is a small market.

Re:Who is this meant for?

[Kevin Stevens]

This seems kind of gimmicky. The price point makes it unlikely that any home users will purchase it when it is cheaper to buy a usb harddrive, but the form factor and hardware make it impractical for an enterprise setting where it doesn't make any real sense in a large distributed network.

Though I suppose it could be good for a small office setting with file sharing needs...

So theres that..

This product in particular is weak and I am not sure why this review in particular made the front page, but I do have a NAS box of a different sort that works quite well, at least for my purposes. I live in NYC, and so my apartment is not much larger than a shoebox, and I got rid of my desktop awhile back in favor of just keeping a much smaller laptop. Laptops have small drives though, and I wanted more storage. A small NAS box fit the need perfectly- I got one by Synology that is a BYOD (Bring Your Own Disks) so it is upgradable and also supports RAID. The model I bought was fancy and runs linux and has a built in Apache, FTP, Windows Media Server, among other things and it runs linux... so you can hack around with it as need be- essentially it works as a miniature, quiet, low power server, which is exactly what I wanted. It sits next to my router and I never think about it. I put in some big disks and actually use it as a backup server for my laptop as well.

In a family setting, if you convinced everyone to put their data on the shared disk as opposed to their local pc, you mitigate the risk of one of their machines breaking and them losing all of their stuff.

These devices fit my needs perfectly, and I think as we see home networks grow and solid state drives proliferate, we will probably see more of these drives- SSD's will hold the OS and apps, and the NAS will hold all your MP3's, movies, etc- possibly with them being able to be accessed by the tv's and audio equipment in your house. It exists today on high end niche equipment, whether it will become easy enough to use to catch on with the masses is still kind of a question mark.

Re:Who is this meant for?

[gfxguy]

Since I use my laptop for most of my work (it's quieter, uses less energy, and there's no performance penalty for practically everything I do, which is mainly just editing files), I'd been thinking of what a good desktop replacement system would be.

First, the reason I still keep my desktop is for higher end video... games and occasionally video editing. So I was thinking along the lines of a replacement system that was as generic as possible...

A small system with a brick power supply... it would only have those things necessary for extremely fast processing and graphics... so, CPU, memory, and a PCI express slot (or two). Absolutely everything else would be external (mostly USB), including keyboard/mouse, audio, USB to ethernet adapters, DVD players... the only other ports you might want are firewire (but then if it's got two PCI slots, you could always add one) and maybe eSATA.

You could remove a lot of what the BIOS has to do... no floppy controllers, no parallel port, no built in video, no built in ethernet, no built in serial ports... all of these things can be done via USB, even if you need an actual serial or parallel port. It should make the basic system very simple.

Because the basic system would just be CPU/Memory/PCI, it could be powered with a brick (no PS Fan), only one system/cpu fan would be needed (maybe one for video). It could be a lot smaller than a "shoe box," and sip power, and be a real desktop replacement.

Re:Who is this meant for?

[Kjella]

Because the basic system would just be CPU/Memory/PCI, it could be powered with a brick (no PS Fan), Yeah uh huh because the basic system would just be a 100W+ Quad-CPU, Memory 10W/stick and a 300W PCIe 2.0 16x slot. You do realize that your "basic" system is maybe 20% the complexity but 80% of the power draw of a typical system, right?

Re:Who is this meant for?

[gfxguy]

Put it this way; a "desktop replacement" powerhouse laptop has all these things and still runs off a brick or limited battery power, and it's driving a screen, HDD, and optical drive, too.

What what what?!

[techpawn]

So, why not ignore the chip and embrace a box that reflects an entire cultural ethos?

Because I was promised a data centre in a shoebox not an over hyped home file server bottleneck machine!
While we're at it, I want my flying car!

Question of reliability?

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

The LinkStation Mini uses a pair of 5,400RPM 2.5 inch notebook drives to perform its magic, making it the only Buffalo storage unit not to run on SATA drives. You can configure the device in RAID 0 or RAID 1.

Sorry, but while this sounds neat for the SOHO or hobbyist user, this isn't a corporate solution. Until you set up one of these little boxes with at least 5 drives in a RAID 5 array, it will remain nothing more than a curiosity.

Re:Question of reliability?

[techpawn]

Exactly! I can easily see one of my friends asking if I'd like to see their new data centre then opening a modded old style coke machine reviling one of these set ups with beer next to it.
But, I cannot for the life of me can not see any serious professional considering this as an enterprise solution.

Re:Question of reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry, but while this sounds neat for the SOHO or hobbyist user, this isn't a corporate solution."

And it says so right in TFA!

Re:Question of reliability?

[WK2]

Sorry, but while this sounds neat for the SOHO or hobbyist user...

It's too expensive for 99% of SOHO users. Not that they can't afford it, but most would rather just get a USB HDD, or something like the WD myBook. A hobbyist would probably rather make something like it himself.

Re:Question of reliability?

[JayAEU]

No problem, it can be done.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=536838&cid=23234846

Just buy a well built PC (FSC are really nice) and put in a bunch of 2.5" disks in a RAID6 on an enterprise grade OS like Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.

Re:Question of reliability?

[TClevenger]

If you can't move the drives to an identical unit and have them recognized and working immediately, it will remain nothing more than a curiosity. Drives are not the only things that can fail.

This all doesn't sound that radical

[Aram Fingal]

The server units don't seem any more radical than a Mac Mini and there are many small NAS units that have been around for a long time.

Can I turn my girlfriends shoebox collection into

[Anonymous Coward]

a Beowulf cluster?

Nslug anyone

[silas_moeckel]

The first one with it's ability to run via poe was nice but otherwise they look a like like the old lynksys nslug by the specs.

Running a pair of notebook hard drives as a mirror set might cut it for a very modest office or a home user. But it seems a bit nicer to put it all into one package like the asus and linksys AP's with USB ports for drives and printers.

Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[EriktheGreen]

This article is about a nifty little NAS server that's turn-key, runs linux, and runs on an embedded MIPS chip. It's neat, but it's not a replacement for a data center. Or most workgroup file servers. It's about on a par with the network attached hard drives that are pretty common in most computer stores now. Kinda neat, but unless you're into "japanese-ness" of technology that's all it is. This stuff doesn't matter....

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[Anonymous Coward]

that doesn't exclude the possibility that:
data center = this

I'll take my pedant points now...

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[hey!]

Well, sure, but I also remember when Japanese cars were called "rice cookers". I can recall marveling at this tiny Datsun sedan with its almost toylike 1.2l, 69 hp engine that one of the neighbors bought. I thought it was cool, although that was a decidedly non-cool idea of "cool".

The other neighbors had cool cars like the Plymouth Duster, which boasted 225hp and nearly five times the displacement of the Datsun. Another neighbor had a Buick Wildcat with a 401 inch (6.6l) V8 that generated an astonishing 325 hp, and that was without the optional supercharger. It's almost frightening to imagine that car, with its enormous mass and laughably primitive suspension supercharged. Some of the cars on my street had engines rated at significantly over 400 hp. Not a few had mpg ratings under 10 miles/gallon, and these weren't really considered big cars.

The point is, sometimes it pays to keep an eye peeled at the other extreme of the spectrum from everybody else when you're looking for sources of technological innovation. That doesn't necessarily mean you can pull your boat trailer with a 69 hp engine, of course.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[EriktheGreen]

>That doesn't necessarily mean you can pull your boat trailer with a 69 hp engine, of course.

Sure you can, if it's geared correctly. Check out the HP ratings on the US Army 2 1/2 ton trucks that were used in world war II... you'll be surprised :)

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[hey!]

Sure, but I'm assuming that you (a) want to arrive at the boat ramp in one piece and (b) you want to actually spend time with the boat in the water this weekend...

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[Anonymous Coward]

"Data center" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[jsiren]

That doesn't necessarily mean you can pull your boat trailer with a 69 hp engine, of course. For small values of "boat" you can.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[autocracy]

I engineer a 150hp locomotive. I can pull your boat, your car, and maybe even your house.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[hey!]

I engineer a 150hp locomotive. I can pull your boat, your car, and maybe even your house.

Not on route I95, you can't. In any case, a 150hp locomotive? What is that, a kiddy ride? I thought locomotives were in the 2000 - 6000 hp range, with self-propelled railcars being in the 500-1000 range. You must be measuring horsepower by some different method. I know that steam engines can be rated by boiler horsepower but be capable of delivering much higher net horsepower over short distances, by a factor of five or more. The old Stanley Steamers with a 20HP rating could actually deliver 125HP for a while, before boiler pressure started to drop.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[autocracy]

Saying locomotives are in the 2000-6000hp range is like saying that that cars are in the 250-750 hp range. Yard locomotives tend to top out at 2000hp (Union Pacific's newest switcher models have 3x700hp engines).

The train I work on is 2ft gauge, and the 50 year old diesel locomotive puts out something on the order of 1,000ft-lb of torque. The best writeup I've seen is at http://gold.mylargescale.com/Scottychaos/MNGRR_diesel1.html. It looks like it's basically half of a GE "44 Tonner". I think it's a custom modification of their 25 ton model (3 of this series were built, the first page describes that story).

Basically, though, it is now a museum engine. While very capable, I don't think I could argue against your calling it a "kid engine." Then again, with more torque than any 18 wheeler I can think of, perhaps it's not so childish? It'd be able to go down I-95 nicely if it weren't limited by its narrowness of dimension. (GE says don't go over 20 because it'll tip. I think the big locomotives are limited to 35 if they don't have a load).

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, sure, but I also remember when Japanese cars were called "rice cookers".

Where I come from, they still called "rice burners".

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[symbolset]

Data center folks... You know you can sell them 72GB SCSI drives all day. They have no clue about reliability, performance, capacity or redundancy. All they know is what they learned 10 years ago when they got their certs, and what their rep has told them since. They have no desire to read Google's published data.

SAS is the latest fad if they're not buying into iSCSI or whatever else they've been told is the latest trend in reliability and performance.

My vote for reliability, redundancy, bandwidth, volume and price? A low power Linux or BSD host on a platform with lots of bus bandwidth with lots of SATA Host controllers that support the attached SATA Port Multipliers. Then calculate. Five drives per Port Multiplier, 16 port multipliers per host controller (PCIE x8). Capacity is nothing less than immense even with the cheapest available drives (That's 800 SATA drives per x8 PCIe slot). RAID 6 with LED indicators. Net Drive bandwidth across this many drives can approach RAM bandwidth. Latency is not as good. Add processor cores to divide the data processed/network bandwidth to suit. With cheapest B/$ drives this is 400TB/slot. With highest capacity it's 800TB/slot or 3.2PB per server. For capacity on a retail solution this is about the max. YMMV. Rack mounts? Try sheet metal, a bender and a drill. Fans are <$1 in volume. You can put drives three deep and 20 wide in 3U with a PSU at the rear with room for cables. That's 800 drives per standard rack, with room for the server also. Failures? If a drive in an array fails, take an image of it and throw it away. The peers of a failed drive are probably doomed.

Of course if you need really high volume data storage you should send me a gmail with the specifics for a more tailored solution :-)

Naturally you're going to need a fatter network tube. At 10 Gbps it takes 44 minutes to backup 3.2PB.

Re:Um... data center != NAS server !=this

[EriktheGreen]

I had a nice reply to this typed out, but Slashdot's beta on-screen editor ate it.

But basically what you're describing is a non-redundant commodity hardware version of a NAS or SAN array. It has lots of single points of failure and most importantly is missing the software that manages all that data.

EMC and Hitachi sell large versions of it, based on much the same hardware, and get probably a lot more cash for it than they should given their costs, but those old time data center folks aren't all that far off from what you're describing... they just realize there's significant value in making running all the disk storage someone else's problem. :)

Erik

Yes, but

[wumpus188]

For a real datacenter you will need a Beowulf cluster of these.

Re:Yes, but

[jd]

Nononono. When it's shoeboxes, the correct clustering term is an Imelda Marcos.

Sensationalist headline

[Anonymous Coward]

make buying a dedicated data server on a rack look like a relic of the past.

Plat'Home pitches this as a handy box for things like vending machines

Gee, vending machines. Those are just like a datacenter.

This thing is cute. I could see some use in the datacenter, or at home. But it's not a "Data Center In a Shoe Box".

We'll grant you that the system limps along on a single 400MHz (AMD/Raza) Alchemy MIPS chip.

So what? I can buy blade servers which have quad-core 2000MHz processors which are about the same size as this device.

We run 100 machines with Dual-Core 3GHz processors. How is this single 400MHz box going to replace these dedicated servers?

wrong

[nguy]

The unit runs the SSD Linux operating system, which straps NetBSD userland functions onto the Linux kernel

I'm sorry, but that just seems completely wrong... or, rather, backwards.

Re:wrong

[larry bagina]

why? The *BSD userland (and man pages) are far more consistent than the hodepodge of gnu/linux utilities.

Re:wrong

[nguy]

V7 userland and man pages are even more consistent than the hodgepodge of BSD utilities, but that doesn't make them better.

Consistency is a poor measure of real world utility. If it were, we wouldn't be using either BSD or GNU.

Begs the question

[iminplaya]

Just how many of these "data centers" would it take to fill Imelda Marcos' closet?

Re:Begs the question

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't.

Size error

[Verdatum]

It's not as big as a shoebox, it (OpenMicoServer) is as big as a shoebox _lid_.

Hehe the Mrs. is gonna be pissed

[garett_spencley]

When she realizes there's no shoes in the thing.

Belated April fool's joke here I come...

I know this is wrong because...

[dbdweeb]

According to all the informative SPAM I get, bigger is better so this just can't be right.

NSLU2 by linksys

[Ardeaem]

These devices look like they do basically the same thing as the NSLU2, by linksys, which you can hack to run debian. I have one running in my living room right now. Or am I missing something?

Re:NSLU2 by linksys

[apt-get moo]

An NSLU2 has less performance and transfer speed than most home NAS systems with dedicated storage. And with NSLU2s, you have to carry all your hard disk enclosures and PSUs with you separately. On the other hand, the NSLU2 is cheap if you want to use it for more exotic tasks like streaming webcam data.

But is it as good as...

[HungSoLow]

a dick in a box?

Re:But is it as good as...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean as good as this?

Wrong market targeting

[sw155kn1f3]

No way it's going to do anything to real data centers.. And just targeting this slashdvertisment as "data center for geeks in you mom basement" is just stupid. For real geeks is laughable - kind of child play, for all of us who seen real DC hardware.
For general consumer which wants his routing and data back up it's not going work too. Sounds too complex (marketed for geeks), too hard to configure.
These are just glorified routers for very limited community to write software for and hack various devices with it. They're pretty cool indeed. Home automation? etc

It's not a datacenter it MONITORS datacenters

[gelfling]

The devices are designed to monitor other devices like surveillance cameras, vending machines, data collectors, VPN servers, simple NIDS appliances, even firewalls and whatnot.

It's very similar to industrial SBC computers, onboard car computers and the devices that are stuck on telephone poles, cell phone towers for remote C.O. management. SBC's, PC104s, pico-ILX form factor devices that use boot from flash with memory card storage are pretty common. What they've done here is bolted that spec on to common PC I/O ports e.g. USB and left the power supply unhardened for cost purposes.

255g!

[e2d2]

255g? That's only .04 stone!

YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[Caspian]

I'm sick of people Slashvertising these devices. You cannot buy them. Quoted from their own goddamned page: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers.". Period, full stop, end of sentence. You can't buy them. Maybe the company you work for can buy them... presumably, if they want to buy many of them. But you, the consumer, the individual geek hobbyist, can't buy one to mess around with.

Re:YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever. You could always group buy them through a shell or something.

Re:YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[Caspian]

That is highly non-trivial, and you know it. Begone, troll.

Re:YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[jsiren]

What if my company bought a load of them and sold them to individual geek hobbyists?

Re:YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[Caspian]

I'd love that. Do it. Then we'll talk.

Re:YOU CAN'T BUY THEM.

[Curly]

I'm sick of people Slashvertising these devices. You cannot buy them.

If you can't buy them, then doesn't that mean that this *isn't* a slashvertisement?

Maybe it's news for nerds just because they're cool.

where is the demand for this

[blhack]

This really feels like a neat piece of tech just LOOKING for a market. The linked website doesn't say anything about fitting a laptop hardrive or anything inside of it. It just says "flash card". So it can't store much, but it DOES have ethernet ports.

So is this thing pointing itself at the Soekris or W.R.A.P boards then (these devices are both aimed at embedded firewalls, and wireless access points)? It really doesn't look that way.

So you've basically got yourself a little box, with a flash card slot in it, and some ethernet ports on it. It doesn't have a very big Processor, or a much RAM.

So what, really, is the point of this thing?

Small, Quiet, Slow Server with No Video

[billstewart]

One of the devices they mentioned was 400 MHz, one was 266. They're definitely servers, at least in the sense that they have no video (and unlike audio, which you can add with USB, there's no obvious way to add it.)

So it's basically something you'd use for a small home web server, or applications like DNS.

Another alternative is to take an old laptop and add a bigger disk.

Here's one you CAN buy

[FranTaylor]

www.soekris.com

I have a 5501. It works like a champ. Fedora 8 runs great on it. 500 MHz Geode, 512 MB RAM, 4 x 100 Mb Ethernet, USB, CF, PATA, SATA. The computer uses 5 watts and the SATA drive uses another 2 watts.

Mini-ITX and Blades

[bradgoodman]

It's not quite a "shoebox" - but same principal. I made a 40-node Mini-ITX datacenter a few years back. Very cheap, low-power, cool (temperature), etc.

I still use one as my main server at home.

Picts at:

http://www.bradgoodman.com/pictures/itxblade.jpg

http://www.bradgoodman.com/pictures/itxbladex40.jpg

Re:Mini-ITX and Blades

[dwater]

I had similar thoughts when I read tfa.

I buy all my mini-itx stuff from here :

http://www.mini-itx.com/

I recently wanted to do RAID1 in a case that only fitted one 3.5" HDD - and it was the space for a low profile 3.5" HDD too.
I used their adapter to fit in two 2.5" drives into the space of a single 3.5" drive. Works really well :)

I really recommend that site..

iSCSI?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish there'd be "home" solutions that'd support iSCSI instead.

Re:iSCSI?

[planckscale]

Nexentastor is a free virtual machine that utilizes zfs and allows you to run iscsi/nfs targets lickedy-split quick. They're not quite at ver 1.0 yet though.

Re:iSCSI?

[nurb432]

Ever hear of FreeNAS?

Re:iSCSI?

[MrCreosote]

or OpenFiler?

Misspelling on your site

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/

"The graphics works out of the box wiht Xorg-7.2, but it uses the panel size set in the EFI (which unless you have changed it with the Apple TV setup) is 720x400. Changing this shouldn't be a problem but the current driver doesn't seem to support it."

wiht/with

~ Kylu

Don't bother trying to buy one...

[mccabem]

From their website, "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers."

Re:Don't bother trying to buy one...

[sethstorm]

Does that preclude just forming a company in order to purchase them? Or are they insisting on large amounts of lost sales(that would be too large to ignore)?

The real question is..

[Plazmid]

Linux? The real question is can it run Crysis on high?

Did anyone notice the ads?

[KGIII]

The ad on that page is Rolling Rock's Logo on the Moon... It is off topic but sufficiently geeky enough for us.

Re:Did anyone notice the ads?

[ShadowsHawk]

It's most likely a scam to get people to talk about Rolling Rock. Why spend money to develop giant lasers when you can generate word of mouth hype with a few bill boards. Side note; Rolling Rock tastes like piss.

Re:Did anyone notice the ads?

[KGIII]

Two minor bits of info... Yeah but piss might taste better and the other is that it is a great idea if they actually pull it off. I'm gonna look and see if they do it.

Garbage Semantics - A "datacenter" on my BB

[jr76]

"Okay, okay. We'll grant you that the system limps along on a single 400MHz (AMD/Raza) Alchemy MIPS chip."

Current Blackberry 8100 Pearls run the Intel PXA901 processor @ 312 MHz (and have a CF slot, the same), so should I be calling my phone now a "datacenter" too?

*rollseyes*

I'd rather have shoes in my shoe box.

[apt-get moo]

I'd rather have shoes in my shoe box.

Sure, you can strap hard disks too, but it just doesn't feel as comfortable walking on them.

Was there ever a 40GB Nomad?

[freeweed]

No wireless. Less space than an iPod. Lame.

Nice, but when will they sell to end users?

[sethstorm]

They seem to be not able to get the idea of selling them to more than just companies, but to end users.

Plathome can try again when they've fixed that problem. Otherwise, it's just vaporware.

Re:Nice, but when will they sell to end users?

[Tjp($)pjT]

They rent evaluation units for free to companies, and offer a discounted method to buy the evaluation unit if that is preferred. It is on their website under the evaluation section.

Floating point dreams

[heroine]

Someday, hopefully floating point will become popular for networking. Then they'll start putting the FPUs on these ARM chips.

Cute, but no data center

[nurb432]

I don't see any redundancy for starters.

Also, a 'data center' is more then just lots of storage, people also run applications and 'services' ( like SQL ) in the "data center".

For something to carry around in your bag or to stick in your garage or the trunk of your car, it might be nice, but please don't misrepresent it.

Re:Cute, but no data center

[Tjp($)pjT]

Redundancy? Buy two. Use OpenBSD and CARP. Dedicate the 10/100 link to the pair. Use the 10/100/1000 ports on each as required by the application. This is 1/2 the effect rack space at about 1/3 the effective CPU horsepower as some of our network appliances we custom configure. It might make sense at the very low end for some of our customers. We also host on Mac Mini systems were I lament the lack of a second ethernet port. But OS X supports 1394 w/TCP/IP just fine so not a total train-wreck to set up very low cost redundant systems... These boxen look quite nice for experimental use and for dedicated processors in harsh environments. Like a data center monitor for when the environmental controls fail.

The old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Then there's an oldie but goodie: the World's Lowest Power Web Server, running on a single AAA battery and a bank of potatoes.

Wow, it's been way too long since we got to Slashdot something like that.

Servers in a Shoe box? Been there done that .

[SirDrinksAlot]

Is this just a re-branded Yellow Dog linux shoebox server? I recal them being yellow with a black logo and EXACTLY the same specificiations like 6-7 years ago.

Bump

[turing_m]

Allow me to second that. =10W (even including a laptop drive in external enclosure), silent, for any application that needs less than about 3MB/s, 1MB/s over sshfs. Brilliant.

Whatever you do, don't use the stock Linksys OS. nslu2-linux.org has everything you need.

Heat?

[jriskin]

Says it will run like 120f, but how hot do you think it would get if you stacked a few dozen of these in a few rows packed tightly together?

Even smaller is the GUMSTIX solution

[Douglas Goodall]

Still smaller is the "gumstix" computer solution. Running Linux and having a usable web server. Not much larger than a pack of gum. I have one I have been playing with. Very cool tech indeed.

http://www.gumstix.com/waysmalls.html

Page won't load

[symbolset]

What's on it?

With proper software and hardware

[symbolset]

A 400MHz processor can saturate a 1Gbit network link, or two. If they're File servers, more is not needed.

If they're serving files from encrypted media to encrypted links without offloading the encryption, there may be issues. Otherwise the excess clocks are unnecessary waste of watts.

I like the slug

[symbolset]

When Intel introduces a business card sized platform with Atom though, it's all over for the slug.

Point of the article?

[LostMyBeaver]

What was it that made this article interesting?

Does it do user auth?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking for a small box to use on my network but what i'd really like it to do is user auth. At the moment i have two dual boot machines and an XBMC box. when i get a laptop that'll be six systems each with the exact same set of usernames and passwords set up on each. Fortunately these are unlikely to change in the immediate future but it'd be good to be able to set groups (e.g. I'm a "power user" according to Active Directory at home, giving me write access to some shares that others only have read access) - at least - in a central location without having to have a full blown windows 2000 box running night and day.

Wow, the uses that come to mind....

[cryptodan]

You could essentially add this to any home/car audio system and have your entire music collection ready for play at just the touch of a button, and its small enough to carry in a purse or in a nifty bag. Would be awesome to see what else can be done with this.

Twice the power, half the price

[Anonymous Coward]

Get an Alix board from PCEngines (http://www.pcengines.ch ) for twice the performance, half the price and an even lower power draw... Plus fully intel compatible so very easy to run linux on