4 ms·

How much power does it take? I've realized with some services it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.

by novok 4y ago

stonewall 4y ago
I almost certainly don't save any money considering electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total? If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear. That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Probably 3-5amps total? A raspberry pi draws 2+ amps. Your dual Xeon server is drawing a lot more power. That said, typically you’d want to measure in watts because amps is relative. Eg a RPI is 2A at 5V while a computer is probably 5A at 120V - an order of magnitude more total energy consumed.
- chinaman425 4y ago
  [dead]
- pmarreck 4y ago
  do you backup offsite? if not, in the event of a fire, your data will live under your "poof!"
  - stonewall 4y ago
    I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots. Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home. I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good.
    - maxboone 4y ago
      https://www.rsync.net/ https://www.rsync.net/ does ZFS receives, so you can send those encrypted / without unlocking.
      - rb666 4y ago
        That's minimum $60 p/m, a bit steep.
        ptman 4y ago
        There are a couple of different offers. https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=710b50 https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=710b50 is hn discount. There's https://www.rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html https://www.rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html and https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
    - xur17 4y ago
      > I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good. I recommend Backblaze B2 - $5 / TB, and supports s3's api.
      - orangepurple 4y ago
        Backing up 100+ gigs of data to Backblaze B2 is PAINFULLY slow. I tried to back up a few terabytes and gave up after a few gigabytes because it was so extremely throttled (paid plan) that a backup would have taken weeks or months to complete. (I have gigabit fiber optic service).
j45 4y ago
For homelab or self hosting, Power per watt is my favourite measure now. Depending on your need (many apps just idle most of the time) a usff pc can make an excellent proxmox server. Check out a Lenovo m920q, Dell Optiplex 7060, HP EliteDesk or ProDesk 800 series. They are easy enough to bump to 64G of ram and stack up as you need. The 8700T cpu is a desktop grade in a small shell and watt footprint and also has vpro and hyperthreading. It’s not a rack server but it’s easy enough to add a Mac Studio/Mini soon enough for crunching. I have spent too much time with full rack server gear and using it a can seem like a matter of preference before need. It’s heavy, hungry, noisy, and my better half didn’t like when I brought the leftover data centre stuff home. The USFF boxes are near silent and sip electricity.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The M1 Mac mini with linux will probably end up being the best self hosting hardware.
  - j45 4y ago
    Agreed. Support for packages is improving but still not seamless. Can ram still be upgraded in Mac minis? The m2 Mac mini is a workhorse. Exciting times.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      They can't be upgraded as its on the SoC. But if you are buying them new, you can just max it out initially. Asahi linux is pretty much complete for server use cases. The majority of what's missing is thunderbolt, suspend, video decoders, all stuff you don't need on a server. Probably the main issue you will run in to is funding ARM docker images, usually you have to rebuild them yourself.
      - j45 4y ago
        The cost of maxing out a mini from Apple typically puts it at least double the cost in a computational power per watt model. It might be feasible to but 2 or 3 usffs to cover one max mini at a fraction of the cost, or stick the mini to doing only certain tasks on 8 or 16gb. Since the m1 addresses memory differently less ram should go further, but I’m not sure if those efficiencies extend to virtualized machines. I’ll try to dig up an old spreadsheet and add the the m1’s and m2’s stack up to the above. The arm docker image is a real deterrent. Forums have more and more workarounds and tweaks so hopefully they’ll become available as time goes on. It’s often not worth fighting with compiling.
digitallyfree 4y ago
I pull <100W idle with a HPE G8, Thinkcenter Tiny, and enterprise routing/switching in my basement. All this is old hardware and you can bring it down with newer stuff. The idea is to size your equipment appropriately and not have a huge rack running just because you got the servers for free. Also while bandwidth costs less in the cloud compute and storage is much cheaper if you host it locally. If you want a server to host your public website, do it in the cloud. If you want a file server for local use the price and performance benefits quickly overweigh the power cost. There also is the additional factor of having the equipment/data 100% under my control, which is very important to me.
hinkley 4y ago
One of the advantages of getting the family Togo outside during the warm months is that more of your kWh for self hosted equipment get burned in the winter, where they are offsetting some of your heating costs.

How much power does it take? I've realized with some services it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.

by novok 4y ago

How much power does it take? I've realized with some services it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.

stonewall 4y ago

I almost certainly don't save any money considering electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total? If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear. That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> Probably 3-5amps total? A raspberry pi draws 2+ amps. Your dual Xeon server is drawing a lot more power. That said, typically you’d want to measure in watts because amps is relative. Eg a RPI is 2A at 5V while a computer is probably 5A at 120V - an order of magnitude more total energy consumed.
chinaman425 4y ago
[dead]
pmarreck 4y ago
do you backup offsite? if not, in the event of a fire, your data will live under your "poof!"
- stonewall 4y ago
  I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots. Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home. I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good.
  - maxboone 4y ago
    https://www.rsync.net/ https://www.rsync.net/ does ZFS receives, so you can send those encrypted / without unlocking.
    - rb666 4y ago
      That's minimum $60 p/m, a bit steep.
      - ptman 4y ago
        There are a couple of different offers. https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=710b50 https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=710b50 is hn discount. There's https://www.rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html https://www.rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html and https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
  - xur17 4y ago
    > I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good. I recommend Backblaze B2 - $5 / TB, and supports s3's api.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      Backing up 100+ gigs of data to Backblaze B2 is PAINFULLY slow. I tried to back up a few terabytes and gave up after a few gigabytes because it was so extremely throttled (paid plan) that a backup would have taken weeks or months to complete. (I have gigabit fiber optic service).

j45 4y ago

For homelab or self hosting, Power per watt is my favourite measure now. Depending on your need (many apps just idle most of the time) a usff pc can make an excellent proxmox server. Check out a Lenovo m920q, Dell Optiplex 7060, HP EliteDesk or ProDesk 800 series. They are easy enough to bump to 64G of ram and stack up as you need. The 8700T cpu is a desktop grade in a small shell and watt footprint and also has vpro and hyperthreading. It’s not a rack server but it’s easy enough to add a Mac Studio/Mini soon enough for crunching. I have spent too much time with full rack server gear and using it a can seem like a matter of preference before need. It’s heavy, hungry, noisy, and my better half didn’t like when I brought the leftover data centre stuff home. The USFF boxes are near silent and sip electricity.

Gigachad 4y ago
The M1 Mac mini with linux will probably end up being the best self hosting hardware.
- j45 4y ago
  Agreed. Support for packages is improving but still not seamless. Can ram still be upgraded in Mac minis? The m2 Mac mini is a workhorse. Exciting times.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    They can't be upgraded as its on the SoC. But if you are buying them new, you can just max it out initially. Asahi linux is pretty much complete for server use cases. The majority of what's missing is thunderbolt, suspend, video decoders, all stuff you don't need on a server. Probably the main issue you will run in to is funding ARM docker images, usually you have to rebuild them yourself.
    - j45 4y ago
      The cost of maxing out a mini from Apple typically puts it at least double the cost in a computational power per watt model. It might be feasible to but 2 or 3 usffs to cover one max mini at a fraction of the cost, or stick the mini to doing only certain tasks on 8 or 16gb. Since the m1 addresses memory differently less ram should go further, but I’m not sure if those efficiencies extend to virtualized machines. I’ll try to dig up an old spreadsheet and add the the m1’s and m2’s stack up to the above. The arm docker image is a real deterrent. Forums have more and more workarounds and tweaks so hopefully they’ll become available as time goes on. It’s often not worth fighting with compiling.

digitallyfree 4y ago

I pull <100W idle with a HPE G8, Thinkcenter Tiny, and enterprise routing/switching in my basement. All this is old hardware and you can bring it down with newer stuff. The idea is to size your equipment appropriately and not have a huge rack running just because you got the servers for free. Also while bandwidth costs less in the cloud compute and storage is much cheaper if you host it locally. If you want a server to host your public website, do it in the cloud. If you want a file server for local use the price and performance benefits quickly overweigh the power cost. There also is the additional factor of having the equipment/data 100% under my control, which is very important to me.

hinkley 4y ago

One of the advantages of getting the family Togo outside during the warm months is that more of your kWh for self hosted equipment get burned in the winter, where they are offsetting some of your heating costs.