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

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.

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: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.

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: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: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.