[150402] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Most energy efficient (home) setup
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Thu Feb 23 10:30:38 2012
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:29:35 -0800
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Mail-Followup-To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <4F455A8B.80809@mompl.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
--FL5UXtIhxfXey3p5
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
In a message written on Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 01:13:47PM -0800, Jeroen van A=
art wrote:
> After reading a number of threads where people list their huge and=20
> wasteful, but undoubtedly fun (and sometimes necessary?), home setups=20
> complete with dedicated rooms and aircos I felt inclined to ask who has=
=20
> attempted to make a really energy efficient setup?
I've spent a fair amount of time working on energy effiency at home.
While I've had a rack at my house in the distant past, the cooling
and power bill have always made me work at down sizing. Also, as
time went by I became more obsessed with quite fans, or in particular
fanless designs. I hate working in a room with fan noise.
As others have pointed out, there are options these days. Finding
a competent home router isn't hard, there are plenty of consumer,
fanless devices that can be flashed with OpenWRT or DDWRT. I've
also used a fanless ALIX PC running a unix OS, works great. Apple
products like the Mini and Time Capsule are great off the shelf
options for low power and fanless. Plenty of folks make low power
home theater or car PC's as well.
The area where I think work needs to be done is home file servers.
Most of the low power computer options assume you also want a
super-small case and a disk or two. Many Atom motherboards only
have a pair of SATA ports, a rare couple have four ports. There
seems to be this crazy assumption that if you need 5 disks you need
mondo processor, and it's just not true. I need 5 disks for space,
but if the box can pump it out at 100Mbps I'm more than happy for
home use. It idles 99.99% of the time.
I'd love a low powered motherboard with 6-8 SATA, and a case with
perhaps 6 hot swap bays but designed for a low powered, fanless
motherboard. IX Systems's FreeNAS Mini is the closest I've seen,
but it tops out at 4 drives.
But what's really missing is storage management. RAID5 (and similar)
require all drives to be online all the time. I'd love an intelligent
file system that could spin down drives when not in use, and even for
many workloads spin up only a portion of the drives. It's easy to
imagine a system with a small SSD and a pair of disks. Reads spin one
disk. Writes go to that disk and the SSD until there are enough, which
spins up the second drive and writes them out as a proper mirror. In a
home file server drive motors, time you have 4-6 drives, eat most of the
power. CPU's speed step down nicely, drives don't.
The cloud is great for many things, but only if you have a local copy.
I don't mind serving a web site I push from home out of the cloud, if my
cloud provider dies I get another and push the same data. It seems like
keeping that local copy safe, secure, and fed with electricty and
cooling takes way more energy (people and electricty) than it should.
--=20
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
--FL5UXtIhxfXey3p5
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.18 (FreeBSD)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=36ct
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--FL5UXtIhxfXey3p5--
