On 29/04/10 03:11, Andy Davidson wrote:
This is interesting to me, because I have been looking to replace some of my hosted VM infrastructure with low power devices such as the ones discussed in this thread. They would make ideal static webservers, recursive dns servers for our offices, development and staging environments, and some of our internal apps. The Soekris units have a reseller channel who bundle the boards with power supplies and a 1U case.
My motivation ? Each VM costs me 20W of power. One of the Soekris units runs in 10W.
I have so far held off because the Soekris net6501 [0] promises to be a much more capacious device, but so far pricing and availability has been illusive. If anyone has any more info on this upcoming unit or some other Intel based low power 1U boxes.
I've rack-mounted standard-case Soekris boxen by bolting them to rack blanking plates with holes for the LEDs to shine through. The net5501 can take internal hard drives in its standard case. The standard Alix cases are too small for that, although you may be able to get third party cases with a drive bay and internal PSU. Of course if you use network storage (or even flash) that won't be a problem. Alix boards also pull less power; even the lowly net4501 turns up its toes given a 500 mA PSU, whereas the Alix goes just fine with one (measured draw, ~ 400 mA under load), not that I'd do that in the field. Larger Soekris models are even thirstier. I'm guessing from past behaviour, the Soekris net6501 is going to be a bit pricier and pull a bit more power than you'd like. It'll also be late; www.soekris.com says "production availability in Q1 '10", it's Q2 already and there aren't even prototype photos yet. This doesn't surprise me; Soekris has a history of over-optimistic release schedules. For this application, it may be worth having a look at some of the nettop boxes; a quick perusal suggests that the Atom based ones are still a bit thirsty on power (which also leads me to think the net6501 might not achieve what you want), but there are other breeds which might be suitable. -- don