Slashdot Asks: What's In Your Home Datacenter?

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?

Comments

Small setup

[manu0601]

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)

Re:Small setup

[hawguy]

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?

Re:Small setup

[Electricity Likes Me]

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.

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you use wifi doesn't mean ethernet is somehow depricated. Some choose to not use wifi for security concerns (lots of nonsense with home gear lately), or even future proofing. There is a simplicity with ethernet that can be appreciated, installing it to every room may not make sense for you, but it may for others.

Re:Small setup

[hawguy]

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.

I live in a newish condo, built within the past 10 years, standard wood framed construction. I live in a 50 unit condo complex with a 60 unit apartment across the street, I can see dozens of my neighbor's SSID's, so it's not exactly an RF dead zone. (well, at least not in the 2.4Ghz band. Seems that AT&T is still issuing single band Wifi equipment since I see a lot of AT&T SSID's, but none in 5Ghz, I still get my own 5Ghz channel because 5Ghz is so rarely used around here)

I use an Asus RT-66U as my Wifi router, centrally located on the second floor, antennas rotated horizontally to try to maximize vertical radiation patterns to get more signal downstairs.

Re:Small setup

[timeOday]

Try streaming mpeg-ts captures from broadcast TV over wireless. They put Netflix to shame.

Another think that hardly works at all over wireless is remote X clients. X is amazingly sensitive to latency. (Yes, you can try to set up NX etc...)

Re:Small setup

[Hamsterdan]

Ethernet is faster, more reliable, and less susceptible to interference. Right now I'm picking up about 40 access points (might be more, my card is only 2.4. Besides, transfering stuff is faster with Gigabit ethernet...

Re:Small setup

[EvilSS]

Try streaming mpeg-ts captures from broadcast TV over wireless. They put Netflix to shame.

I've done this and it does work. The problem I always ran into wasn't the bandwidth, it was the encryption. I would cook the routers streaming 1080p TS files with WPA2 enabled. Eventually gave up and ran ethernet. Living in a rental townhouse, I had to get creative with runners and area rugs to do that without punching holes in walls...

Re:Small setup

[MightyYar]

The force is strong with you. I have everything hardwired because I could never get Wifi to work reliably, or with the speeds that I need. It might be related to my needing 2 routers to provide coverage to the entire house.

Re:Small setup

[Osgeld]

bout to say, do a full hard disk backup over wifi heh

I only have wifi right now except for the main 2 computers and its both handy and a pain in the ass when you want to setup something in the other room without wifi

Re:Small setup

[Penguinisto]

Dude - I live in a 105-year-old house, in a small town just outside Portland (OR), and I still do well even with a big front/back yard.

The trick? Easy:
1) the wifi router is upstairs, away from the chimney but with a clear shot downstairs (and to each bedroom).
2) It's an ASUS router (screw that cheapie one that the ISP gives you; disable that and hard-line to a decent wifi router with a good reputation made for gaming.)
3) Scan the frig out of your neighborhood, and pick a channel no one else is using.

Result? In spite of my laptop, the TV, Dish DVR, my wife's iPad, and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)... http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3771041924 (taken off my MacBook Pro just now.)

Re:Small setup

[bobjr94]

I agree. We have wifi of course, but on GB lan I get 80-100 MB/second on transfers.

Re:Small setup

[profplump]

Some people -- particularly those with 2 servers -- transfer data on paths other then WiFi endpoint Internet. Wired Ethernet is definitely faster in such cases. It's also frequently more reliable, easier to secure, allows simultaneous full-speed transfers, is full-duplex, doesn't incur a repeater penalty for transfer among local endpoints, requires less configuration and frequently avoids the need for custom driver installation.

Not that there's anything wrong with WiFi. It has lots of useful applications, its own set of benefits, and is definitely sufficient or even preferable for many installations. But to suggest that there's no use for wired Ethernet in a tech-heavy home scenario is ludicrous.

Re:Small setup

[thegarbz]

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

I see this kind of comment on Slashdot often, frankly I think you live in an amazingly noisy RF area. I've gotten pretty much full speeds of 802.11n. I can see 14 other access points from my phone but they are all relatively low dB compared to my main wireless router, and my access point on the opposite side of the house (installed because I needed access in the backyard, not because of deficiencies in a house). I suppose if you live in high density apartments then wifi can be a problem but doesn't most of the world live in suburbia, in either town houses, unit complexes, or actual proper houses?

Re:Small setup

[MMC Monster]

Agree 100%. I with I had more ethernet connections in my livingroom and bedroom media closets. When I finish my basement I'm not going to make the same mistake.

WiFi is great for laptops and phones and stuff, but I don't want my movies or music glitching because of wifi interference.

Re:Small setup

[GTRacer]

[...] and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)...

May I ask why you keep WiFi off at home? I completely understand keeping it off away from home (Thank you Llama!) to keep ad-snoops from trying to tag me in stores, etc... But home?

Then again, my poorly-positioned and very outdated Linksys WRT-54G can't get a VOD-capable signal into my room from the den some days, so it's mobile data at home a lot for me ><

Re:Small setup

[Penguinisto]

I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me. :)

Spiner

[turkeydance]

that's the Center of my Data.

Frankenserver

[ihtoit]

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.

Re:Frankenserver

[BringsApples]

I have about 40TB of storage.

At your house???

...or your parents' basement? ;)

Home / Work

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Old school

[slowdeath]

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

Re:Old school

[Anne Thwacks]

Wot no LA36? How do you do your core dumps? (ASCII Pron).

Learning Lab

[millhouse513]

When we moved into our house, I managed to pick up a full rack off craigslist. I'd planned to populate it with all my servers (a collection of vintage Unix systems as well as some modern vmware nodes). Part way through I realized I value a cooler and quieter room so I've been working to move everything over to quieter systems. For my vintage collection there's not much I can do -- SGI and Sun boxes only came in a few ways, but I tend to keep them off for the most part. My "main" systems have gone from a few really loud, power hungry, heaters, to more specific purpose boxes. For example, my FreeNAS box was an older ebay Xeon server complete w/server grade (read: LOUD) fans, but is now an i5 server with more RAM than before (and faster) and it's so quiet I can't tell when it's on. A few other "servers" I'm moving from 2-3U boxes to 4U boxes with larger 120mm fans. I'll probably grow it one or two more servers as things change but I'll be much more focused on power and cooling rather than raw power. The server rack will stay though...My friends that helped move it in said that I had to sell it with the house, so if anyone is looking for a house in Texas in 5-10 years and wants a server rack, I may have just the house ;-)

Not my cup of tea

[jones_supa]

Maybe as a kid I was fascinated by the idea of having a server or "data center" at home, but these days I would hate to babysit all that trash. Normal networking equipment and a computer or two is enough.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[rainmaestro]

I had the same realization a few years ago. Had a rack, plenty of older servers (mostly Sparcs I got free from work when we decommissioned them). All they did was heat up one room and doubled my electric bill. I've become very wary of overprovisioning now, something techies have a bad habit of doing.

A decently-specced laptop for my day-to-day work and a beefier laptop running ESXi to replace the servers (for a home setup, most VMs don't need that much in the way of resources) takes care of most of my needs (ignoring a gaming rig and the requisite consoles). An Asus wireless router running dd-wrt handles all my networking kit needs. Consumes little space, uses far less power and generates no appreciable heat (important in Florida, my A/C bill is high enough as it is).

Re:Not my cup of tea

[dugancent]

You and me both. My datacenter consists of a 4tb HDD plugged into the usb port on my router. Thats it.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[BringsApples]

There's some pride when I show friends my setup

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but pride in what? If it takes more time to manage it than it should, what's there to be proud of? Computers are supposed to be about efficiency (uptime included).

old school

[EthanBernard]

Rolodex 1753, Smith-Corona Super12, roll of stamps.

Porn of course.

[Nyder]

I have porn in my home data center. What else would I have in it?

Re:Apple's decently low-power

[Toe, The]

I was going to post roughly the same thing. Data service is not defined by the number of u's. It's by the service you get out of it.

I can't imagine having racks in my house unless my full-time career is intensive hacking. Otherwise, I'm just nerding out, wasting boatloads of power, and filling my house full of noise and heat in order to show chicks how incredibly sexy I am with my racks full of linux boxes and hubs and UPSes and whatnot. Ahem.

A single Mac mini is an amazing home server. It's the hub that my more portable devices check in with or rely on. And it's all I need, and more. It is shitloads more powerful than a rack full of computers I admin'd a decade ago, so why would I need more?

Why I want ethernet to every room

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't answer for him, but I can give you my reasons for wanting to run ethernet to every room. I'm not done yet, but I'm actively doing it as I update rooms.

Some context, I have 3 kids, a wife, and me (and two set of grandparents who visit for about a month of two each year (in total, not all at once) with their iPads, Android devices, etc). And, truthfully, wi-fi does work for all of us, but most of the kids have a computer sitting at a desk, why do they need wi-fi for machines that are just sitting there anyways?

That said, here is the list of reasons I want ethernet in every room:

First, bandwidth sharing, wi-fi is fast, but not that fast, especially when we have six tablets using it at the same time as all the computers... offloading the computers from the wi-fi will solve a lot of bandwidth issues for the tablets (I'm always surprised watching the kids use a laptop and a tablet (or two) simultaneously... considering their next toy will probably be Android Phones... well... it just keeps adding demand to the wi-fi resources).
Second, security, yes, I know it sounds old fashion, but I've already replaced two wi-fi routers because they stopped supporting the latest security (remember WEP versus WPA)... when a new exploit or attack comes out I like the option of shutting the wi-fi down to analyse it (that's more a personal interest, but still, the family can't be without internet while I tinker).
Third, dead spots, I have one bedroom that wi-fi just will not work in, and I don't have a clue why either. The room faces the coldest winds during Winter and was the original master bedroom so my guess is that it was "extra" insulated when the last owners did some work there, but I need to do some investigation into why they would have insulated or used something on the inside walls versus all the other bedrooms (4 on that floor, wi-fi from any of the 3 works to the other 3).
Fourth, coverage, right now I use two Wi-fi's, one in the upper floor and one in the basement which gives fairly good coverage of the house, but with wired connections I can spread that coverage even better (in particular I have wi-fi's that can let me limit their strength so I could then have 3 or 4 wi-fi routers and keep their strength low so that I can keep it within the house itself and not blast good strength across the street while still having a dead-spot in my own house).
Fifth, internet-of-things, I'm not that into it right now, but more and more devices are going to require/use internet connectivity, again, most of those devices will be stationary (think Blu-Ray player, game box, TVs, fridge, stove, stereo, alarm clock), each may only take a small amount of connectivity, but all those pings, traces, network checks and handshakes are going to saturate any wi-fi in the long run (I can do it now with 10-12 devices so can see the writing on the wall when we are at 30-50 devices).
Sixth, guaranteed uptime and reliability, I keep my wi-fi routers on a remote on/off switch so I can turn them off and on again from whereever I happen to be sitting, I use it about once a month to reset the wi-fi routers (I've replaced some routers that had to be reset daily!) , but I have never (ok, maybe yearly since we loose power at least once a year) had to reset my switches. I think for internet-of-things, having intermittent network connectivity issues will be a huge problem, wi-fi routers are flaky compared to wire and non-router based switches in this regard. Additionally, I have servers to host data and files for all the devices, if I plug it into one router and that router happens to go down, well, everyone looses access, while if the wi-fi routers each connect directly to the switch which has the servers then my kids can just move to another room or change their access point (if it doesn't do it automatically for them -- sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, depends on the fault with the Router) and everything continues to work :)

Hope that helps answer the question. note that I would never get rid of wi-fi, but I can definitey justify running ethernet to every room :)

Why do this?

[aussersterne]

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?

Re:Why do this?

[DerekLyons]

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

Because for any given hobby... there's always going to be someone out at the end of the bell curve. The photographer with $190k worth of gear who drives a $500 car and lives in a $5k house. The model train enthusiast who builds a 2500sqft house around his 1800sqft train layout. The IT geek with enough horsepower in his basement to run a decent sized ISP.. They're all birds of a feather.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I actually know the first two examples personally.)

Re:Low Power

[nullchar]

Don't 30 Terabytes of disk use waaaaay more power than two Atoms? How did you get 30 TB linked to those anyway?

Re:Down to one for me...

[brokenin2]

I've always wanted to have a fairly minimal setup.. We don't have a lot of space, and I don't want to waste a lot of energy, so I've always tried to have 1 always on server as my target. I've had two and three at times, but mostly just during upgrades, or while I was waiting to find the time to upgrade..
I have 1 quad core i7 with 32 gigs of ram, and 8 1.5 terrabyte hard drives running in RAID 6. The hardware has two network cards, which allows me to do just about everything I want with virtual machines running under KVM. Things are getting a little tight these days, so I'm looking to upgrade to 3 terrabyte drives for 18 terrabytes usable space, and I'd also like to move up to 64 gigs of ram, but I'm going to wait as long as I can so maybe the prices will come down a bit.
The server runs cool and is pretty quiet as I've chosen to go with a 4U case with the largest fans I could find. I've got a 24 port gigabit switch and an access point to round out my hardware.. Everything else is virtualized.

Hardware Summary:
4U server - 32 gigs ram, i7 9 terabytes usable RAID 6, and dual nics
1U 24port gigabit smart switch
2U rack mount UPS
generic 802.11 b/g/n access point

Virtualized:
Firewall/vpn server
File server
Plex server
4x part time windows XP for experiments and various utilities
3x part time windows 7
Vuze server

Benefits:
quiet
reliable
small footprint
relatively low power (about 150-175 watts most of the time, and during the winter it just reduces the amount the electric furnace runs)
low maintenance

Downside:
All your eggs in one basket - I have backups, but I'll be down in the event of hardware failure.
VM host is a little weaker than is optimal when I'm running a lot of guests

Article fails to understand watts

[Hypotensive]

This article would be a whole lot more impressive if the author actually knew what a watt was. The article repeatedly uses kW/hour even though this is not a measure. You either have a kilowatt (measure of power, or energy over time), or a kilowatt hour (amount of energy that running one kilowatt for an hour, or kilowatt MULTIPLIED BY hour, consumed).

Saying "average consumption is 1-2 kW/hour" is just nonsensical. If you mean that consumption is 1-2 kilowatt-hours, then over what time? Or more likely you just mean that average consumption is 1-2 kilowatts.

Re:Low Power

[jabuzz]

Stick a couple of port multipliers on it. It is a home setup so max out is going to be a couple of 1GbE bonded so about 220MB/s, which is way less than the bandwidth of two SATA2 ports, so with port multipliers that is at least 10 disks, run a RAID6 of 8D+2P with 4TB disk and bingo 32TB of storage. Plenty of Atom boards will take 8GB of RAM which is more than enough for a NAS and the Linux software RAID is all SSE accelerated code so even an Atom has way more grunt than is required.

HP Proliant microserver

[MatthewHays]

The HP microserver is relatively cheap, quiet and looks nice enough to sit in my (minimalist) home. It has one SSD for the OS, and two redundant large high capacity disks. The server is on 24/7 and serves all my media (plex etc) and services to wherever I am in the world. All my devices backup their data to it regularly. A subset of this data (things I wouldn't want to loose in a fire) is then sync'd up to my google drive.

Nice and simple, and just works without fuss. Most of my friends use their datacenter as an excuse to geek out, and enjoy the complexity (and the subsequent instability), but I'm most interested in it as a functional/reliable item that I setup once, and use everyday.