4 ms·

I remember when the company I was working at bought a bunch of new Sun hardware, and ended up throwing out all their old Sun 420Rs. Despite being slightly outd

by bmelton 12y ago

I remember when the company I was working at bought a bunch of new Sun hardware, and ended up throwing out all their old Sun 420Rs. Despite being slightly outdated, they were still in perfect condition, so I took the 4 of them to the house (carefully, because they were heavy) and set up a pretend data center. The first shock, I can confirm, was the noise they made. I ended up relegating them to the basement, which was otherwise unused. The second shock was when my utility bill came in the next month. It's very easy to know the power consumption of enterprise-class servers for planning purposes. There's a giant abstraction between the power consumption on paper, and the power consumption on your home utility bill that I think everybody working around servers should experience at least once. They were retired, shortly after.

mrbill 12y ago
The noisiest system I've ever owned was a Sun T1000 1U server. Here's some examples. I tried to mute it a bit by putting it in a huge tupperware-like under-bed storage box, but even that didn't help one bit. http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/ http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/
- greedo 12y ago
  I worked on a stack of T1000s. We had a room next to our sysadmin hovel that we used for setting up systems before putting them in the datacenter. I worked remotely a lot, and would periodically reboot these servers. When they booted, part of their POST was running their fans at 99% of their RPM capability. The noise was astounding, and my coworkers grew pretty tired of me...
chiph 12y ago
I had the opportunity to get a 7U Compaq server for cheap one time (quad xeon CPUs, tons of RAM, 2 different RAID arrays). And I'm looking at it thinking "Wow, this would be so cool to have at the house!". But then I look at the label by the dual power supplies: 20A circuit required -- each! I would have to pay an electrician to install a new breaker and run a new line to it. And that would have doubled my purchase costs. I passed.
Swannie 12y ago
Heard the same often repeated about enterprise grade storage arrays. These things keep the disks spinning pretty much all the time. A home grade NAS is going to aggressively power save. Absolutely: don't confuse home/SME with enterprise grade. The needs are very different.

by bmelton 12y ago

mrbill 12y ago

The noisiest system I've ever owned was a Sun T1000 1U server. Here's some examples. I tried to mute it a bit by putting it in a huge tupperware-like under-bed storage box, but even that didn't help one bit. http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/ http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/

greedo 12y ago
I worked on a stack of T1000s. We had a room next to our sysadmin hovel that we used for setting up systems before putting them in the datacenter. I worked remotely a lot, and would periodically reboot these servers. When they booted, part of their POST was running their fans at 99% of their RPM capability. The noise was astounding, and my coworkers grew pretty tired of me...

chiph 12y ago

I had the opportunity to get a 7U Compaq server for cheap one time (quad xeon CPUs, tons of RAM, 2 different RAID arrays). And I'm looking at it thinking "Wow, this would be so cool to have at the house!". But then I look at the label by the dual power supplies: 20A circuit required -- each! I would have to pay an electrician to install a new breaker and run a new line to it. And that would have doubled my purchase costs. I passed.

Swannie 12y ago

Heard the same often repeated about enterprise grade storage arrays. These things keep the disks spinning pretty much all the time. A home grade NAS is going to aggressively power save. Absolutely: don't confuse home/SME with enterprise grade. The needs are very different.