Cheapskate Server Farm

[CyberNerd]

We built a rack of 10 Lenovo 'Servers' to use as terminal servers.

dual core 3GHz, Solid State disks, 4GB RAM.

 

all for £4500

 

should increase capacity of our citrix farm a bit.

 

 

[gibbo_ap]

if i remember correctly isnt this the way google makes their farms?

[CyberNerd]

I got the idea from a friend who worked for the Medical Research Council in Cambridge around 2001. THey built a 'farm' of cheap Athlon servers to do predictions of molecular structure. Rumor is Google do it too, as long as there is redundancy in the farm, it seemed like a good idea. It's been quite a fun engineering challenge.

 

now got to image them all....

[pete]

Was the idea to keep everything on a shelf self-sufficient or weren't you tempted to use a psu per two shelves? I can't see the rating on the PSUs from the picture, but they look bigger than the standard lenovo "low power draw and just enough juice for one box" option.

 

You missed out the 12v battery

[CyberNerd]

Was the idea to keep everything on a shelf self-sufficient or weren't you tempted to use a psu per two shelves? I can't see the rating on the PSUs from the picture, but they look bigger than the standard lenovo "low power draw and just enough juice for one box" option.

 

You missed out the 12v battery

 

They are straight out of an A58 case, PSU and everything. We just added some RAM and SSD's. Couldn't quite fit 2x mobos per rack.

[Butuz]

Interesting!

 

I'd be interested to know how many watts all 10 x farm servers use though?

 

Was the hardware lying around?

 

Butuz

[ChrisH]

Very nice I have a few of those shelves lying around........ I will keep it in mind for future projects.

[FN-GM]

if i remember correctly isnt this the way google makes their farms?

 

They do indeed

[CyberNerd]

Interesting!

 

I'd be interested to know how many watts all 10 x farm servers use though?

 

Was the hardware lying around?

 

 

The hardware was all bought in new. I've no idea about the power consumption, IIRC they are 450W PSU's but not sure what they draw at full load. The SSD's keep the power down, do it's only processor usage really.

We probably won't bother with virtualisation for this lot - but a decent virtual platform would allow the unused machines to be powered down.