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Slashdot Asks: What's In Your Home Datacenter?

Posted by samzenpus on from the show-and-tell dept.

First time accepted submitter jvschwarz writes There was a time when I had rack-mount systems at home, preferring old Unix boxes, Sun-3 and early SPARC machines, but have moved to low-power machines, Raspberry Pi systems, small NAS boxes, etc. Looks like some are taking it to another level. What do other slashdotters have in their Home Datacenter?

7 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Small setup by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Small setup here: 12U rack with 2 servers and one switch (Yes, I have ethernet sockets in every room except toilets, though I regret a bit I did not install one there)

    1. Re:Small setup by hawguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Small setup here: 12U rack with 2 servers and one switch (Yes, I have ethernet sockets in every room except toilets, though I regret a bit I did not install one there)

      What do you do with ethernet to each room? I have a single 802.11n dual band Wifi router that serves the whole house, I can stream at least up to the speed of my internet connection (50mbit) from anywhere in the house and in the small front or back yards. My TVs are both Wifi enabled, and I can stream "SuperHD" Netflix streams from both simultaneously. I have a second 802.11bg Wifi router that's dedicated to a few several IP security cameras.I have a central fileserver plugged into the ethernet port on the Wifi router that stores DVD's, and all of my computers run backups to the fileserver.

      So, I'm curious what you do with your home network that you need ethernet to each room?

    2. Re:Small setup by Electricity+Likes+Me · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

      With 802.11n I don't see transfer speeds higher then 1.1 mb/s, presuming only 1 device is online.

  2. Frankenserver by ihtoit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Core: ancient Dell laptops, which are nice and quiet and run on 70W power supplies. Seven of those, and five dozen hard drives from 120GB all the way up to 2TB apiece either in USB enclosures or in rackmount/grab boxes which are in turn connected via USB IDE adapters. So there's some hotswapping involved but all told I have about 40TB of storage.

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  3. Home / Work by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since I work from home now and had to get a bit more serious about my data storage, I bought a Synology Diskstation, and have been quite happy with it. I was a bit worried because I'm more experienced with Windows than Linux by far, but they've got a great web-based interface and hide any sort of complexity, and it connects easily enough to Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.

    The Synology has a nice backup program let's me to back up data to an Amazon S3 account. Since it's pay by data volume, and I'm only storing a few GB of code and assets, my monthly bill runs about ten cents a month. My local data is backup up to my NAS, and my NAS backs up to my S3 account. I figure I'm probably pretty well protected that way.

    I can't compete with those racks in the linked article, though. My NAS box sits on a desk and has about the footprint of one of those phones, and it doesn't have nearly as many sexy blinking lights and exposed patch cables. Ah well.

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  4. Old school by slowdeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A PDP-8m with 16KW of core memory and a pair of 8" floppy drives, and a VT-320 video terminal.

  5. Why do this? by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I sort of don't get it. White box PCs with many cores, dozens of gigabytes of RAM, and multiple gigabit ethernet ports cost next to nothing these days with a few parts from Amazon.com. If the goal is just to play with powerful hardware, you could assemble one or a few white box PCs with *many* cores at 4+ GHz, *tons* of RAM, gigabit I/O, and dozens or hundreds of terabytes of online RAID storage for just a few thousand, and plug them straight into the wall and get better computation and frankly perhaps even I/O performance to boot, depending on the age of the rackware in question.

    If you're really doing some crazy hobby experimenting or using massive data storage, you can build it out in nicer, newer ways that use far less (and more readily available) power, are far quieter, generate far less heat, don't take up nearly the space, and don't have the ugliness or premium cost spare parts of the kinds of gear being discussed here. If you need the features, you can easily get VMware and run multiple virtual machines. 100Mbps fiber and Gigabit fiber are becoming more common and are easy to saturate with today's commodity hardware. There are an embarrassment of enterprise-ready operating systems in the FOSS space.

    If you really need high reliability/high availability and performance guarantees, I don't get why you wouldn't just provision some service for yourself at Amazon or somewhere else and do what you need to do. Most SaaS and PaaS companies are moving away from trying to maintain their own datacenters because it's not cost effective and it's a PITA—they'd rather leave it to specialists and *really big* data centers.

    Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

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