[geeks] Cheap Dell Servers

[Francois Dion]

On Feb 6, 2008 3:50 PM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
> Those cheap Dell servers that people have been picking up lately...  do
> their motherboards conform to a standard form-factor or are they
> something proprietary?
>
> The reason why I ask is that I've found a case which has 9 (!) 5.25"
> open drive bays in the front for less than $110 shipped.  I'd love to be
> able to throw a few hundred dollars at the problem to get a solution as
> beefy as an 8-core Xeon.
>
> I'm building an extensible NAS box.  I'll be able to fit up to fifteen
> 1TB SATA drives in this thing, five at a time.

You can deffinitely saturate more than 1 gig ethernet ports with that...

Compare my minuscule NAS media backend I have built. An almost free
NAS (plus the cost of drives) with a Compaq EVO w/P4, a second 100 Mb
ethernet card and a few 500GB usb drives (less than $100 each).
Nexenta with no GUI as the OS, ZFS boot/root mirror on the two
internal drives, ZFS raidz on the external drives. I dont have a
problem recording OTA HDTV while playing a movie on my solaris media
box, and streaming music to my phone, laptop, and wife's computer.
HDTV stream is only 20Mb, and mp4 at most 20Mb also, but usually
lower, while I can, thanks to ipmp, feed 20MB/s, which is plenty more.
In fact I could record yet another OTA HDTV stream (which can contain
up to 5 channels in SDTV) and theoretically play yet another video
stream, although I have not tried it yet since I have yet to order a
HDHomerun tuner.

I could have gone multi core, gigabit etc... But I cant even saturate
2 x 100 Mb/s links. That way I stay completely in the domain of stuff
you can get for almost free (100Mb cisco switches, P4 pcs, etc).

With Nexenta, Solaris SXCE 81 or Solaris SXDE4 (1/08), you also get
CIFS beside of NFS on your ZFS filesystem, so visitors with their
windows based laptops can also play music or movies that I store on
the NAS.