Ask Slashdot: Little Boxes Around the Edge of the Data Center?

First time accepted submitter spaceyhackerlady writes "We're looking at some new development, and a big question mark is the little boxes around the edge of the data center — the NTP servers, the monitoring boxes, the stuff that supports and interfaces with the Big Iron that does the real work. The last time I visited a hosting farm I saw shelves of Mac Minis, but that was five years ago. What do people like now for their little support boxes?"

Re:Little boxes

[SDrag0n]

You do realize that everyone who watched weeds will be humming along right?

Re:Little boxes

[msauve]

Are you sure about that [youtube.com]?

HP Proliant MicroServer N40L

[steveha]

I don't work in a data center. But I think you might want to look at an HP Proliant MicroServer.

Basically it is an AMD laptop chipset on a tiny motherboard in a cunningly designed compact enclosure. The SATA drives go into carriers that are easily swapped (but not hot-swappable). It's quiet and power-efficient. It supports ECC memory (max 8GB) and supports virtualization.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009-5153252-5153253.html?dnr=1 [hp.com]

Silent PC Review did a complete review of an older model (with a 1.3 GHz Turion instead of 1.5 GHz).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer [silentpcreview.com]

SRP is $350, but Newegg has it for $320 (limit 5 per customer).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052 [newegg.com]

Newegg also has 8GB of ECC RAM for about $55, so you can get one of these and max its RAM for under $400.

I just got one and haven't had time to really wring it out, but I did do the RAM upgrade. Despite the tiny enclosure, it wasn't too painful to work on it, and I was impressed by the design. The Turion dual-core processor has a passive heat sink on it, and the single large fan on the back pulls air through to cool everything. (There is also a tiny high-speed fan on the power supply.)

I'm going to use this as my personal mail server. It's cheap enough and small enough that I plan to have at least one put away as a hot spare; if the server dies, I'll power it down, move the hard drives to the spare, and I'll have the mail server back up within 5 minutes. Not bad for a cheap little box.

Re:performance?

[TwineLogic]

Exactly. The latency of response in an NTP server must be consistent in order for the algorithm to converge. It doesn't matter what timing source is used for a reference, if the network communication has variable latency, the NTP precision must degrade. It's revealing that VM proponents don't seem to understand this.

Re:VMs

[jrmiller]

Not really. NTP's such a lightweight service that it runs fine on a vm. As other posters have mentioned, you certainly don't want to use the system clock as your time source, but you shouldn't do that anyway. Hopefully you're syncing with an upstream provider that syncs from a non-computer-based source. See http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ntp.html [navy.mil] for a good sync source (among many others). We've successfully virtualized NTP servers serving a 6000-person university.

NTP servers are NOT about consistency

[tlambert]

NTP servers are NOT about consistency, they are about making badly designed protocols, such as NFS, capable of limping, instead of just falling on their face.

If the requests on these protocols used a client timestamp for the client's idea of the current time, then the server on receiving the request could look at its idea of the current time, and arrive at a delta before it actually did anything other than enqueue the request locally.

Then when the server responded with a non-"now" timestamp in any client response, it could apply this delta to the response value, and as far as the client was concerned, it and the server would have synchronized ideas of "now", without resorting to all of this NTP BS or worrying about clock drift, or anything.

I lobbied very strongly to try to get this fixed in NFSv4; maybe we will get our collective heads out of our butts by NFSv5.

If you can't rack it...

[funkboy]

...I don't want it in my datacenter. If you have no budget for non-revenue-generating boxes for services like DNS, NTP, etc. then upgrade the server hardware you tore out of production after the last upgrade cycle with SSDs and low-wattage processors & put it back into service for your internal needs.

Otherwise get a few Dell R210s or some other small cheap rack server with an IPMI 2.0 BMC and get on with your business. Any money saved by buying "mini-PCs" (or whatever you want to call them) for any datacenter computing hardware you plan to rely upon at all will be burned the first time you have to drive to the datacenter and physically babysit some cheap machine because it didn't have IPMI.