Hardware shinies

Aug 20, 2012 12:04

I've been working on this with other Coderthinkers for the best part of the year.  It's shiny and I'd like two, please.  The Baserock Slab ARM server thing.

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gwendraith August 20 2012, 14:44:23 UTC
Good to see you involved in work you enjoy :)

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gerald_duck August 20 2012, 15:40:43 UTC
  1. How much?
  2. What happens if you try to run it without the fans?
  3. When do you make the full-depth one that includes some drive bays?
(-8

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nunfetishist August 20 2012, 15:49:19 UTC
  1. Quite a bit, alas. But then the HP Redstone and Dell Copper are also eye-wateringly expensive. Our thing has a great deal more flexible networking.
  2. Then you have to put fans in the case to pass air over the passive heatsinks. The current fans are woefully over-specified, chosen simply because they fit.
  3. It already has 10 drive bays: 8 mSATA bays and two 3.5" bays :) It's just an ATX motherboard, so there's a lot of freedom for case choice.

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gerald_duck August 20 2012, 15:56:26 UTC
How much is "quite a bit"? £1,000? £10,000? £100,000?

Hmm. Server gear is typically bloody noisy. ARM-based servers offer the enticing prospect of a quiet server that would be OK in a home environment. But unless those fans are variable-speed, I bet it gets just as noisy as anything else. )-8

Are there better photos somewhere? I certainly don't see any 3.5" drives in the main photo on that website, and I'm not sure I see any space to add them. If it's just ATX, though, that's kinda interesting!

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nunfetishist August 20 2012, 16:01:57 UTC
I think the "finger in the air" is £5000. But the number could vary a lot. (It's not that much either when you consider it integrates eight individual warm-swappable servers, and 24-port managed 10/100/1000/2500/10000 switch.)

The fans are pretty low-speed. It's as noisy as a big desktop workstation. I believe the fans have their tach line loopbacked to the little PMU on each node so it can do variable-speed, but the firmware isn't ther eyet.

The drive bays are at the back of the case, one directly behind the PSU, and the other on the opposite side.

And yeah, you could slap it in an off-the-shelf desktop case if you wanted. The only problem is getting a PSU that provides enough wattage (5 or 6W IIRC) on the standby line to power the ILO (which is a 1.6GHz ARMv5 with GbE.)

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