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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
NVS isn't a "high-end graphics" card, it's specifically designed for driving lots of low-end displays such as in digital signage or systems monitoring. Yes, it's ~$700 for the new card and if you want to dick about with configuring, cabling and managing 16+ Pi's then you're quite welcome to, but if you want something straightforward for a showcase center then it's well worth looking at.
I program and setup pro av for a living and the video wall controller is the "best" option. Also the most expensive but they are highly flexible, especially the higher end ones.
Some of the well known ones to look at are "RGB Spectrum", "Christie Spyder", Extron QuantumView, And the the reigning king Jupiter Systems.
The best of these will let you define a virtual canvas as large as your wall is, and inputs are used as windows on that canvas, any layout you want. And presets are very nice and flexible and can allow for various view scenarios with the push of a button.
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.
YES we are, in every area, but jobs are in Shanghai. We are in fact looking for NOC engineers and process people. Senior engineers in all areas: Linux, DBA, Security, Performance, Troubleshooting, tools, managers and much more. We are building the world's top MSP and running numerous multi-hundred mullion user systems, doing the most difficult things on the Internet today.
I know you are probably being a bit facetious, but our career site:
http://careers.chinanetcloud.c...