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Ask Slashdot: Little Boxes Around the Edge of the Data Center?

Posted by timothy on from the gee-look-at-all-the-little-black-dots dept.

First time accepted submitter spaceyhackerlady writes "We're looking at some new development, and a big question mark is the little boxes around the edge of the data center — the NTP servers, the monitoring boxes, the stuff that supports and interfaces with the Big Iron that does the real work. The last time I visited a hosting farm I saw shelves of Mac Minis, but that was five years ago. What do people like now for their little support boxes?"

12 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    put them in VMs!

    1. Re:VMs by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Call me old school, but Unix/Linux are multi-tasking. Why not just run multiple services on one OS directly on the metal?

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    2. Re:VMs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Uhhh. because the "little boxes" and individual servers run on unicorn farts and angel tears?

  2. bunch of VMs on a box or two by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Not using a huge collection of physical boxes any more. Just set up a bunch of VM's and leave them to it.

  3. VMs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why not make one box a VM host and have your various support boxes VMs (except for the ones that NEED to be physical).

    1. Re:VMs? by green1 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Redundancy doesn't mean having different services on separate boxes, it means having the same services in multiple places. In fact it's easier with one VM box hosting everything, because it's easier to keep it backed up and sync'd to a spare then it is to do a whole bunch of individual ones.

  4. Re:virtualization is the game now by Zaelath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Virtualized NTP is about the dumbest thing I've read on /.

    Yes, worse than various conspiracy theories and fanboi wars.

  5. Previous gen hardware by trandles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Last generation's compute nodes. We keep some around for utility functions after decommissioning a large cluster.

  6. Re:virtualization is the game now by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To be fair, if someone cares enough about time accuracy to understand why that's a dumb idea, they should probably be using a GPS receiver instead of a PC.

  7. performance? by Chirs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    NTP server is all about consistency. If it's running in a VM and can be delayed at the whim of the host, do you think it's going to be a very good source of time?

  8. SOLVED: Little Boxes by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Answer: VMware VMs.
     

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:SOLVED: Little Boxes by philip.paradis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I use KVM on Debian hosts for all my production stuff, but yeah, my first thought was "those servers are all virtualized now."

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      Write failed: Broken pipe