[lug] Low power servers.

[Quentin Hartman]

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification on your needs. In the playing I did
some years ago in the space you're talking about the only gotchas I ran
into were performance, both computational and throughput not meeting my
needs, and the time spent compiling a lot of the packages I wanted to run
because they weren't available in binary form for the platform. I could
have setup a cross-compilation config on a faster box to make that less
time consuming, but for the exploratory stuff I was doing it didn't seem
worth the effort.  The landscape is probably quite a bit different these
days though. I'd be interested to see responses from anyone else who has
played around with this stuff more recently.

QH


On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 1:37 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us>wrote:

> Quentin Hartman wrote:
> > What defines "low power" for you?
>
> I was thinking <20W, though not because I have any constraints.
>
> My current server (dual P-III) runs about 75W (perhaps 10W more if it's
> working hard).  Although
> cutting that is nice, getting rid of fans and old, noisy, hard drives will
> also be nice.  The main
> reason I care about power is just to avoid using more than I need.
>
> > http://www.logicsupply.com/products/vab_800
>
> I guess I didn't say but I'd also like a price tag around $100.  I
> definitely don't need video,
> audio, or keyboard.
>
> I don't need more than one Ethernet port.  Not really interested in wifi.
>
> I need something to connect storage, perhaps flash for the OS but not
> necessarily (the Sheeva did
> better booting from a flash stick than a hard drive).  But whether USB-2,
> USB-3, eSATA, etc I don't
> much care.
>
> I don't care whether the CPU is x86-ish or ARM.
>
> So mostly I'm asking whether anyone has experience making this work and
> any gotchas you've had with
> certain hardware.
>
> The web/mail server could probably run on a pi without any trouble (the
> Internet is likely the
> slowest piece by an order of magnitude).  The file server will be holding
> backups so throughput will
> be noticeable and more is better.  Looks like Ethernet will be the
> bottleneck, then USB2 if I
> upgrade to gigabit.
>
> Probably I can get by with 2 pis at this point and move the file server to
> something else if I don't
> like what it does.
>
> Thanks!
> Dave
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