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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?"

18 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Little boxes by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

    I make them with ticky tack.

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    1. Re:Little boxes by SDrag0n · · Score: 5, Informative

      You do realize that everyone who watched weeds will be humming along right?

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    2. Re:Little boxes by msauve · · Score: 5, Informative

      Are you sure about that?

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    3. Re:Little boxes by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Funny

      network boxes,
      made in china,
      network boxes that go sparky-spark
      network boxes
      exploding boxes
      dangerous boxes, all the same.

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    4. Re:Little boxes by JoeCommodore · · Score: 4, Funny

      Iv'e seen Windows 8, I know what ticky tack little boxes look like.

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    5. Re:Little boxes by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 5, Funny

      There are white ones
      And more white ones
      And they all have those blinky lights
      and they're all made out of ticky tacky
      and they all fail just the same.

  2. 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?

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  3. HP Proliant MicroServer N40L by steveha · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't work in a data center. But I think you might want to look at an HP Proliant MicroServer.

    Basically it is an AMD laptop chipset on a tiny motherboard in a cunningly designed compact enclosure. The SATA drives go into carriers that are easily swapped (but not hot-swappable). It's quiet and power-efficient. It supports ECC memory (max 8GB) and supports virtualization.

    http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009-5153252-5153253.html?dnr=1

    Silent PC Review did a complete review of an older model (with a 1.3 GHz Turion instead of 1.5 GHz).

    http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer

    SRP is $350, but Newegg has it for $320 (limit 5 per customer).

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052

    Newegg also has 8GB of ECC RAM for about $55, so you can get one of these and max its RAM for under $400.

    I just got one and haven't had time to really wring it out, but I did do the RAM upgrade. Despite the tiny enclosure, it wasn't too painful to work on it, and I was impressed by the design. The Turion dual-core processor has a passive heat sink on it, and the single large fan on the back pulls air through to cool everything. (There is also a tiny high-speed fan on the power supply.)

    I'm going to use this as my personal mail server. It's cheap enough and small enough that I plan to have at least one put away as a hot spare; if the server dies, I'll power it down, move the hard drives to the spare, and I'll have the mail server back up within 5 minutes. Not bad for a cheap little box.

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  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. Get a real time server. by attemptedgoalie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Go get a GPS satellite receiver/time server. Actually, get two. Don't screw with time.

    THEN, virtualize the rest of the stuff. Monitoring, syslogging, management, patchers, etc.

    We've virtualized everything except for
    - a Windows DC so that it stays up if the vmware datastores or SAN eats itself in a horrible way.
    - The NIS server we have to use on our UX environment due to an ancient regulation. I'm not willing to put up HP-UX VMs for this right now, otherwise it'd be safe in a VM as well.
    - Anything we can't virtualize due to licensing/contract/support issues. So our VOIP environments, phone call recording, access control systems for the doors,

    My datacenter is getting a lot nicer to look at, and a lot easier to upgrade. I can shift servers or volumes all over the room so I can do live maintenance during the day.

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  7. "Obsolete" hardware by beegle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Those support tasks don't exactly push hardware to its limit, and most of those tasks are the kind of thing that demands a bunch of redundant servers anyway.

    Throw a bunch of "last generation" hardware at the task -- stuff from the "asset reclamation" pile. Leave a few more around as spares. Less disposal paperwork. Works just fine. By the time your last spare fails, you'll have a new generation of obsolete hardware.

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  8. 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.

  9. 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?

    1. Re:performance? by TwineLogic · · Score: 4, Informative

      Exactly. The latency of response in an NTP server must be consistent in order for the algorithm to converge. It doesn't matter what timing source is used for a reference, if the network communication has variable latency, the NTP precision must degrade. It's revealing that VM proponents don't seem to understand this.

  10. If you by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you can't run it on your iPad, it's probably not worth running.

    --Management.

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  11. If you can't rack it... by funkboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...I don't want it in my datacenter. If you have no budget for non-revenue-generating boxes for services like DNS, NTP, etc. then upgrade the server hardware you tore out of production after the last upgrade cycle with SSDs and low-wattage processors & put it back into service for your internal needs.

    Otherwise get a few Dell R210s or some other small cheap rack server with an IPMI 2.0 BMC and get on with your business. Any money saved by buying "mini-PCs" (or whatever you want to call them) for any datacenter computing hardware you plan to rely upon at all will be burned the first time you have to drive to the datacenter and physically babysit some cheap machine because it didn't have IPMI.

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

    Answer: VMware VMs.
     

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