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Ask Slashdot: Tiny PCs To Drive Dozens of NOC Monitors?
mushero writes: We are building out a new NOC with dozens of LCD monitors and need ideas for what PCs to use to drive all those monitors. What is small and easy to stack, rack, power, manage, replace, etc.?
The room is 8m x 8m. It has a central 3x3 LCD array, as well as mixed-size and -orientation LCD monitors on the front and side walls (plus scrolling LEDs, custom desks, team tables, etc) — it's designed as a small version of the famous AT&T Ops Center. We are an MSP and this is a tour showcase center, so more is better — most have real functions for our monitor teams, DBAs, SoC, alert teams, and so on, 7x24. We'll post pics when it's done.
But what's the best way to drive all this visual stuff? The simplest approach for basic/tiny PCs is to use 35-50 of these — how do we do that effectively? Almost all visuals are browser-only, so any PC can run them (a couple will use Apple TV or Cable feeds for news). The walls are modular and 50cm thick, and we'll have a 19" rack or two, so we have room, and all professional wiring/help as needed.
Raspberry Pis are powerful enough for this, but painful to mount and wire. Chromeboxes are great and the leading candidate, as the ASUS units can drive two monitors. The Intel NUC can also do this — those and the Chromeboxes are easily stackable. My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor. Or are there special high-density PCs for this with 4-8-16 HDMI outputs?
Each unit will be hard-wired to its monitor, and via ip-KVM (need recommendations on that, too, 32+ port) for controls. Any other ideas for a cool NOC are also appreciated, as we have money and motivation to do anything that helps the team and the tours.
The room is 8m x 8m. It has a central 3x3 LCD array, as well as mixed-size and -orientation LCD monitors on the front and side walls (plus scrolling LEDs, custom desks, team tables, etc) — it's designed as a small version of the famous AT&T Ops Center. We are an MSP and this is a tour showcase center, so more is better — most have real functions for our monitor teams, DBAs, SoC, alert teams, and so on, 7x24. We'll post pics when it's done.
But what's the best way to drive all this visual stuff? The simplest approach for basic/tiny PCs is to use 35-50 of these — how do we do that effectively? Almost all visuals are browser-only, so any PC can run them (a couple will use Apple TV or Cable feeds for news). The walls are modular and 50cm thick, and we'll have a 19" rack or two, so we have room, and all professional wiring/help as needed.
Raspberry Pis are powerful enough for this, but painful to mount and wire. Chromeboxes are great and the leading candidate, as the ASUS units can drive two monitors. The Intel NUC can also do this — those and the Chromeboxes are easily stackable. My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor. Or are there special high-density PCs for this with 4-8-16 HDMI outputs?
Each unit will be hard-wired to its monitor, and via ip-KVM (need recommendations on that, too, 32+ port) for controls. Any other ideas for a cool NOC are also appreciated, as we have money and motivation to do anything that helps the team and the tours.
https://www.barco.com/en/solutions/Control-rooms
http://www.displayport.org/cables/driving-multiple-displays-from-a-single-displayport-output/
One server, run virtual desktops and have 35-50 thin clients driving your monitors.
No sig here...
Take a look at the nVidia NVS line of GPUs, they're designed for digital signage but would probably work for you - the new ones support up to 32 displays driven from a single machine (4 cards).
There are a variety of cases to help you mount the Pis. They're lightweight enough to where you can literally just heat shrink them and zip tie or foam tape them down. Pis or similar are going to be your lowest-power, lowest-footprint option no matter what. And since these are just operating informational displays, you really don't need anything more than VNC (or the like) to control them, because bandwidth is not an issue. A KVM, IP or not, is literally just something which can fail.
I'm not a Pi advocate specifically, but I fail to see what's wrong with them for this application.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously. A small form factor real computer. Put in 2 graphics cards that can run 5 monitors each. Done. You will have to look a little, but for our... let's just say I bought a lot of 7570 I think (a year and a half in the past) That had 5 mini displayport outputs each. Work like a charm and run up to 5 monitors. What exactly was the problem?
http://gizmodo.com/this-130-wi...
Asus and Intel are making these types of devices. There are probably other companies making them by now as well.
As the content is likely mostly static: What about a single PC with many USB3.0 -> HDMI adapters + USB 3.0 Hubs? Sure, refresh rate will likely go down to something like 10 Hz because of bandwidth limitation but that should fine for your kind of content and driving all screens from the same PC could be very useful for administration.
Jan
What is the name of the MSP, so I can avoid dealing with them? If they could not solve that prolem themself, it is scary to think how they can "help" customers.
http://www.ambery.com/2x2hdvga... Shows all sorts of combinations. rack mounted
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'd use a NUC form factor with one mounted on the back of each monitor (or mounted on the back of every other monitor since it has two outputs). Basically no maintenance, easy to expand, and the off-the-shelf solution means easy to upgrade later. Will never fail if a small SSD is used, and has an ethernet hard port and plenty of resources (including 8-32GB of ram). Most monitors already have the necessary mounts.
-Matt
since this is a tour showcase, and these monitors are all presumably providing metrics and alerts to act upon, why not encode the display and simply beam it wherever you want?
https://obsproject.com/index OpenBroadcast project seems to have been designed for this, and would mean instead of a bunch of computers you could just buy smart TV's with embedded android.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sounds like a nightmare to maintain. At any given time, a handful with just be displaying error messages. You see this in airports, hospitals and conference centers all the time. If it is mostly displaying browser stuff, use an esignage solution. Chromecasts+Greenscreen(a Groupon project) sounds like a good fit. There are also lots of companies that sell a turnkey solution. Ideally, the boxes should be small and really robust. When one fails, a hardware swap with no or minimal software configuration is essential. One can envision netboot or thin client solutions with a management app installed on top, but why bother with that if you really are only looking for something very close to esignage.
Just use a single PC and a matrox card and call it done. HDMI fiber extensions and walk away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Shuttle makes fanless VESA-mountable PCs that use the low power Atom CPUs. This would be a great use for them.
If it's strictly browser-based, chromecast sticks (not the boxes) should work. Google is advertising that use, no less.
-Bucky
Basically I read this as "we want to have some really cool blinking lights when we walk customers through here, even if none of this stuff actually does anything".
Is this marketing, or actually intended to be functional?
Please tell us you are really going to have people working in this room and monitoring stuff and that this isn't just for show.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The low end ones can be pretty inexpensive, presuming you need something more than what you do with a Raspberry PI. The NUC can run whatever OS you care to run on an Intel platform. The NUC's even have VESA mounting holes/brackets designed to attach to the back of most flat screen TVs
Sounds like you need a video wall controller. You then specify the number of inputs/outputs from it. You can then size monitors/resize/do all sorts of stuff. Several vendors have API's available to take control of the video wall controller via scripts/etc.
What you really need is a digital signage solution to manage the displays. There are lots. Almost all of them are capable of embedding a web page on whatever they describe as a 'layout'. This will give you the advantage of being able to display any other kind of content as well. Now all you need is the smallest stack-able x86 machines you can find, to put in the closet nearest to your displays.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I have a Pi 2 (1GB ram) running from my generic Full HD Samsung TV USB port. It powers on when my TV powers on, no problem. Same with my old Pi (256 MB ram). The Pi has nothing sucking power though except keyboard, mouse, wired network, HDMI and the micro SD card.
Having done this twice in the past 4 years, my suggestion is to use rack mounted x86 PCs/servers with dual graphics cards. With ATI cards you can go to 8 or 16 monitors per server and as long as you keep a ratio of 1 screen / cpu, you should be fine (capacity wise). Using PCs (a) will allow for easy maintenance and (b) will be easy for others to work on them. PCs are also much easier to upgrade (hardware wise) as they keep the manual effort needed to a minimum. We've done this with PCs and PIs. PIs are a fun project and so far they work well, but you *will* be swearing in the process as you will have to figure out many things, including power, cabling, mounting, etc.
Just get a pile of AMD cards. Doesn't even matter what model they are as long as they're the same generation (and even then AMD's kinda given up on that). It'll make it easier to set them up as one giant monitor, and you won't get frustrated by running into architecture/power issues.
Yeah, sounds like they really need a video wall controller instead of each monitor being independently driven. With a video wall controller you can drive all the monitors from a single controller and then resize 'windows (or inputs)' across the hole thing, in a corner, etc. Each input becomes a window. You can also save layouts/change them according to shift/etc.
With a video wall controller you specify the number of inputs/outputs you need. Many also allow for IP based sources (cameras, remote screens via IP, etc).
How about something smaller than Intel's NUC, more powerful, fanless and reasonably cheap. Something like the fitlet for example. And VESA Mountable too.
A pc can drive 12 or more screens. daisy chainable DP screens are the best for cutting cables.
Or you can get 6 head mini DP ati cards with 6 mini dp to hdmi ACTIVE adapters each. a pc with 2 X16 slots even at X8 X8 can drive 12 screens. Maybe even a board with x8/x4/x4/x4 or x4/x4/x4/x4 should work as well to have 32 screens.
an 1150 Xeon (can't use on board video unless it's pci / pci-e based) is cheaper then a i7 and gives you Quad-Core + HT.
I have recently installed a new exhibition on a science center where there are about 90 displays, requiring different levels of user interactivity. There are 7 computers driving those displays, ranging from 8 to 18 /computer. I found that I was more limited by the input devices than by the number of displays.
Hint: check AMD W600 graphic cards. Find a suitable board, stick 3 of 4 of those in it and have fun.
Your requests doesn't mention cost but since you mentioned RP I suspect it's tight. However going cheap isn't always the least cost option. Unless of course your time is worth nothing. I have worked in an environment using ClearCube Blade center PC's doing PCoIP to Zero Clients (No OS on client) and it worked really well. We needed high power systems so we had dedicated blade PC's in a 2U backplane but they offer VDI solutions if your needs are more modest. You basically plug an Ethernet cable (Fiber is also available) and power into the client. The CD9742 is a quad DVI client so it meets your intended use goals.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
8 mini DP per card with 4 that is 31 screens.
From the way this question is worded, I've got a hunch that you just bought common screens for the displays.
Danger, Will Robinson. Ordinary screens aren't rated for 24x7 use, and they WILL burn in over time, among other things. If you're not using screens that are purpose-built for this kind of nonstop usage, you need to back up and change that or it'll all be for nothing.
I'm used to seeing data walls and multi-monitor room displays of this sort designed from soup-to-nuts as a full solution by a service provider that specializes in doing so. There's a reason for the existence of an industry to serve that purpose; it's not as easy as just putting up a lot of big television screens and plugging them into small computers, as you're beginning to discover. Be aware that you almost certainly haven't run into all the problems yet, and it may be cheaper to contract with an outside company to do it all. (I do not work for such a company, just to be up front about it. I'm not stumping for business here.)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
You want to impress people, be sure you can grab & throw what's on one monitor to another, plus pinch & un-pinch with whole arm gestures. For the right age of clients, you may also want to be able to play a few older games on entire walls.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Get a rack with a locking smoked plexi door. Mount a sheet of pegboard behind the door. Buy some of those Christmas lights that have a controller that runs two dozen different patterns. Set the controller to randomly cycle through all the patterns. Push the lights through the pegboard from the back to form grids and whorls and loops... play with it until it looks cool, then use a dab of removable caulk to secure each one.
Leave it running whenever a tour comes through. You will be asked about this utterly amazing device so many times you'll have to come up with a name for it - we called ours the "Rozhdestvo Photonic Emission Device", and explained that it monitored and visually indicated the presence of voltage on digitally controlled lines.
Damn good idea!!!
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
Yeah, back in my defense-contractor days we built several video walls for connected C&C rooms.
The high-end systems could put multi-display graphics at 1080p60 from any console to the theater and were based around the 64x64 Thinklogical DCS KVM over fiber modems and fed into a VistaSystems Spyder 12x8 video wall controller (of course they have larger units to drive your 3x3 wall, and you'd also be able to have a "preview" scaled down display of the entire wall which is also good for recording or broadcast). This pretty much lets you juggle sources around your video wall like in Minority Report. Good for theater events and presentations, maybe overkill for a 24x7 control room. The advantage was that you could plug literally anything anywhere and compose it on to the video wall somewhere.
Lower-cost systems were built around RGB Spectrum Quadview - type video wall controllers. These weren't as smooth and glitzy, but could get the bits displayed. The main benefit over software systems is you could zoom in and fill the entire wall with one important display, and you wouldn't have silly screen synchronization issues, which are quite noticeable and distracting (particularly when you put on a movie or sports event)
The point is to use the video wall as a cohesive display and not a matrix of disconnected monitors. It sounds like you're trying to build the latter, though. Personally I haven't found any of those types of displays to be very useful to the actual operators in the NOC, they have their own workstations showing everything they need, so I would say the main purpose of such a wall should be the ability to grab a few displays of any of the NOC operators and post them on the wall to allow them to communicate what they see to observers. But since the NOC operators are busy fighting fires, you'd want a separate AV controller station who can pick out the displays that are useful and freeze and post them to the video wall, be able to screenshot and rewind the video feeds to show notable events, reconstruct a timeline of events, etc.
It's possible to cobble something like this on the cheap using VNC (as long as audio and full motion 3D / video are critical) using vncproxy, vncrecorder, xosd (labeling sources is pretty important), and a few other things. This sounds the most like what you're trying to do, but seems like kind of a waste for the central 3x3 matrix wall. Be sure to use one of the "tight encoding" variants of VNC, such as tightvnc, tigervnc, or ultravnc on Win32, since the screenscraping performance really improves latency and frame rate (not enough for FMV, but close). With your thin client solution, you might be able to hack something together using VLC to each display a different part of a movie, but synchronization will be a big issue.
In short, you probably want a video wall solution + matrix switcher to get the full frame rate and all the bits from any source, and plug any half-assed software compositing solution into that. That's the better approach If you want to get any bit of your money's worth out of the big expensive LCD wall.
The NUCs have 4 USB ports so you may want to consider using a USB 3.0 to HDMI/DVI external video card. I have used these with desktop PCs to drive a total of 4-6 screens without adding additional PCIe video cards.
Some Intel NUC models offer displayport 1.2 output. You can chain qty 4 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) monitors with DP. As for KVM, Avocent has many models, some of which are 32ports or more (KVM over IP). But wondering how this will work because the video outputs are hooked up to monitors, so the KVM will only be used for keyboard & mouse and not video? BTW, this is going to be a heck of a wiring job (power, network, video, other cables). Also take note of power, will need several separate circuits. Which also brings up the question: will be using UPS and generator for backup?. Some commenters suggested virtual servers running virtual desktops with thin clients as endpoints on each monitor, this will work but will be a bit more expensive and harder to implement/manage. Also, unless virtual server infrastructure is redundant (i.e. clustered, etc.), this represents a huge single point of failure. But all of this can be made more redundant if the $$$ is there. Thanks.
I think one CPU per screen is overkill, unless each is going to be it's own discrete Display. A single PC with a bunch of high-end/multi-port display cards would enable you to have a fully-customizable display, rather than 50-60 discrete desktops.
For single cup per display purposes, you could throw a bunch of the Infocus Kangaroo PCs at the problem.
Or, if you really feel you have to throw 50-60 Raspberry Pis at this problem, consider hiring someone to make you a card cage that can hold dozens of RPis in a 2-3U rack chassis, a 20-30 amp 5V power supply shouldn't be that hard to find. (Something similar was done with DEC multias, small, single board Alpha-based computers years ago - difference is, the multia PCB didn't have connectors soldered to every side of the board.
Ken
These guys actually make computers just for that.
https://www.actineon.com/
Allow me to offer a different alternative: the poster has a history of asking such questions.
So, you can optimistically say "wow, this guy gets to do cool things and is using the intertubes for due diligence".
Or, you can cynically say "Wow, first managing passwords, then dealing with managing access for new employees, and now dealing with a realistic-looking NOC ... how does someone get out of their depth so often and need our help?"
By the third "how do I solve this problem which is part of my business model", one starts to ask if this is researching possibilities, or asking if the internet can do your homework. Because the trend is "I run an MSP, and I haven't solved some of the problems I've already signed contracts to deliver, please help".
Of course, depending on your inherent level of cynicism, YMMV in terms of how you interpret that. But I know what mine suggests to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It might be worth considering the Gigabyte BRIX units - there's quite a range, but most of them support dual output (HDMI+VGA or HDMI+MiniDisplayPort). There's one that lists nVidia graphics and triple displays but that might not be worth it; you might also be able to drive dual HDMI with active splitting of the DisplayPort but again, that might not be worth it.
Processors are all over the map from Celeron up to i7.
fencepost
just a little off
Can't believe nobody's asked that yet!
It comes down to who can interact with it how. Are you doing HD or 4K for the monitors? http://www.brightsign.biz/digi...
Check out:
http://www.piwall.co.uk/information/installation
and:
http://dmx.sourceforge.net/
Seriously, one PC for the horsepower then just networked rpi's to create 1 giant screen. who needs KVM when it's just one screen?
depending on the screens you choose the rpi's can easily mount to the back of the monitor, get power from the screen's USB port if it has it, hdmi to the output and the only "wire" you have to manage is the screen power and 1 network cable. Seems simple and scalable.
Surprised nobody has mentioned it.
There are several solutions using X11 to split a virutal screen among slave PCs
E.g. XbigX http://www.x-software.com/en/p...
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
OP mentioned that the screens are just showing browser windows. USB-attached displays perform surprisingly well for that, and have the advantage of working with any Windows PC. Here's a video showing 4 displays: https://youtu.be/KKcMqCAYkpk And one showing 14: https://youtu.be/heB94f6FHd8 Full disclosure: I work for the company that made these videos. One important thing to note is the 14 monitor demo was done with a pure USB 2.0 system. Modern USB 3.0 systems have lower limits in terms of how many USB devices can be connected and you may not be able to replicate this total number (we have a warning about this in the description and in a pop-up in the video). Another option based on 'mushero' mentioning an ideal solution would be "My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor" is the Zotac Magnus EN970 with quad HDMI outputs -> https://www.zotac.com/us/produ... More expensive per display of course compared to our products and not quite as small as a Chromebox, but it is an option nonetheless and we want you have the best solution for your needs, even if doesn't necessarily include our products. Thanks, Bob Plugable Technologies
Hmm, as the OP I value Slashdot's input and ideas on these things.
Our life and what we do is a tad more complicated than most others, in fact, quite a bit more complex than anyone I talk to, and despite my and our decades of experience in these areas, and sustained global searches for solutions, we often have to invent our own systems and technology - you'll see more of this from us over the next 24 months as we open source our best Ops and Management tools.
By the way, my thread on password management resulted in nothing useful as seems what we need does not exist. Good SaaS opportunity, I think. And that's our small password issue, we have much larger and more challenging security challenges that need world-class solutions we may have to yet again invent.
In this case, we have limited experience on modestly large NOCs and what people are doing for the PC selection, mounting, wiring, etc. as this is not our area, hence asking all of you for your input - and lots of good ideas and thoughts here - we'll post pictures and diagrams of what we end up with.
Hi mushero, we (BitScope) are launching a range of power and mounting solutions for Raspberry Pi next week. They can be used to build racks like this. In this case mounting 20 Raspberry Pis. There's a 40 Pi version and we'll have metalwork available too. We'll update this comment with details upon release.
Why tiny? All those monitors have a huge footprint. Use that footprint by putting things underneath them. Sit your three screen array on a server with the few video cards in it (one per four monitors) and you are not losing any more space.
Power supplies fail, backlights die, but burning in is no longer a thing to worry about with consumer LCDs.
True, it's not a task for newbies with traps for new players but at a small scale it's not all the hard. I've set up a few systems in the backs of trucks with six LCDs - cabling and mounting was the largest hassle and it's pretty easy to put a mid sized tower PC case (or several) behind a sliding panel. With displayport and HDMI the cabling isn't really all that hard either.
Yes it's like shopfitting. An ugly functional thing isn't hard, a nice neat job takes more effort. It just means putting a bit of thought into the design instead of throwing things together. A prime example IMHO in the summary is a constraint of lots of independent little computers to drive displays, which implies either not much thought has gone in or there's something driving that constraint we haven't been told about. There's a lot of ways, especially with X windows, of having a lot of independent displays driven by a single machine, which is going to make life easier than a KVM switch.
Or it's a Dice writer putting up article ideas when nothing is interesting in the "ask slaskdot" submissions this week.
For my company's purpose we just use smart TVs, specifically 40" mi TVs for things like netmons/buildmons/stats/etc, and built iframed sites to display different sources of data in a single screen. No external PC to manage and since browser support was the only requirement, works out fine.
I would use VMWare with Zero clients. All the desktops would be virtual - easy to manage, easy to build, easy to change. You can get zero clients that can handle up to 4 monitors and they are relatively inexpensive.
(Monty Python reference, for the young.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Don't know if it's the best answer but it'd be a fun project. Or just skip the monitors and have everyone wear Oculus Rift headgear.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Have you thought about using Intel Compute Sticks for this? They aren't super powerful, but they're only $99 and can more than handle running a web browser.
I actually liked the Raspberry Pi idea better, but if you want to use Windows for your screens... This option might work.