Planning for Servers in 2022 and Beyond

https://www.servethehome.com/planning-for-servers-in-2022-and-beyond-series/

by vanburen • 5 years ago

67 36 5 years ago

dijit• 5 years ago

Something I didn't quite realise with the rise of "The Cloud"; many businesses aren't reselling their 3-5 year old Servers.

That notion only just hit me with the title, and I'm a little sad about it to be honest.

siftyy• 5 years ago

While this is certainly true, facebook, google, Microsoft, and a bunch of other hyperscale cloud providers still regularly dump hardware on ebay for great prices.

rejectedandsad• 5 years ago

As many of them start migrating to more bespoke proprietary solutions I doubt this is going to continue.

_448• 5 years ago

Do they?

I was working for a big US tech company in the UK. They regularly use to give servers and computers for decommissioning/dismantling. Once I asked if I could get those servers and computers to give it to schools and students who could not afford to buy one. I was told that it is not legal to give company computer away. There are restrictions on giving company computers in the open market, even if it is free.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Cant wait for all of those to arrive. We have a sort of stagnation in the past 4-5 years and only only just started moving again. Network, Storage and Compute.

For consumer I really hope we will get 5GBASE-T. Even if it is just one port on the Router would be better than 1Gbps port.

jonatron• 5 years ago

Fiber is easy if you buy fiber patch cables, and just coil up the excess. Copper just has limitations, I wouldn't be surprised if there's no real progress in copper networking in the next few years.

lxchase• 5 years ago

I believe some prefer Copper despite length limitations or interference, because it’s less power and heat compared to fiber and the receiver to translate the light.

sleepydog2• 5 years ago

I've been considering getting fiber to connect two switches on opposite ends of my apartment. The distance is short enough that I could use a slim Ethernet cable, but even the slim ones are pretty noticeable. Fiber cables can be incredibly thin.

I did research, and the problem I found was that there is very little availability for fiber cables of alternative colors. Most of the cables I found that were the right type and thickness I wanted, I could only find in bright yellow that would stick out.

There are a few products like invisilight that are incredibly thin and almost clear which would be ideal. However, they're only sold in bulk to businesses so I could only find some on ebay. It felt too adventurous for me to pull the trigger.

Currently 5Ghz wifi is sufficient, but its bad enough that I refrain from doing anything that consumes a lot of bandwidth, like torrenting.

sokoloff4• 5 years ago

It seems to me like 10Gbps is already “cheap enough” to use where it’s appropriate. DAC (copper) is crazy cheap and fiber/UTP are also pretty cheap. 30m (~100 ft) OM3 fiber is $25 retail; SFP+ 10G fiber modules are $20.

tremon• 5 years ago

The modules and NICs are in the affordable range for network enthusiasts, yes. But I haven't been able to find 10GBase-T switches at consumer prices yet. Do you have some pointers/recommendations?

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

How do you connect fiber? I thought you need very expensive soldering tool which stopped me from looking at fiber for home network.

dnautics2• 5 years ago

A minimal used 10Gbps switch from a cloud-provider grade mfg (arista, cisco, juniper) will run you ~5k, which is pretty expensive. But they are really loud and most people shouldn't put them in their homes.

Microtik is probably good enough for most home serving usage (honestly it would probably be good enough for a small cloud too), and is much cheaper, and way quieter.

pdimitar3• 5 years ago

I am still pondering buying a 10GbE Mikrotik switch. There are 1 or 2 models without a fan -- or such that ServeTheHome says don't make a lot of noise but I'd still be super hesistant to use those -- and I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Do you have any experience with them? Any pros and cons?

unixhero2• 5 years ago

Dual 10gbe pcix costs usd 250 from China. It is already here.

candiddevmike3• 5 years ago

Really looking forward to reasonably priced ARM servers with modular/beefy RAM. I don't get the trend of everyone running RPi clusters with the tiny amount of RAM they have, how do you use that for anything serious?

moondev• 5 years ago

https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

candiddevmike3• 5 years ago

Nice, but that's still too expensive in my opinion for what you're getting. Sure it's 16 cores, but the speed of those cores isn't great. I'm not sure what the right price point is, but you're either at $40-80 for 2-4 core 4GB RAM or $500+ for tons of cores.

My ideal build is $100-200, 4-8 cores, bring your own RAM, mainline Linux support, and a preflashed u-boot SPI so my partitioning and install is BIOS/UEFI like.

pdimitar3• 5 years ago

That's super interesting, enjoyed reading it.

I am pondering of getting a good future-proof server Soon™ but I have my doubts about how cheap (or awfully expensive) this is going to be so I will likely settle for a refurbished Xeon E5 workstation (since I'd like less noise and the ability to cram it full of HDDs/SSDs).

I wonder if the coming of this new-age SSDs will herald a price drop in the classic 2.5" SSDs? I don't believe so because they will be viable for a long time in the future still but I am curious to hear other people's perspective?

What do you guys and girls think?

jlawer• 5 years ago

Markets like web hosting will eat any discounted 2.5” enterprise SSDs. Don’t even mention stuff like chia.

There is such a large market for 2.5” storage that I don’t think we are going to have a large discounted sell off, unlike say DDR4 ECC DIMMs

ksec3• 5 years ago

I really really wish I am wrong, but nothing in the current NAND industry roadmap ( known knowns ) and future technology improvement ( known unknowns ) suggest NAND's cost /bit will get substantially cheaper. Cheapest 2.5" 2TB SSD currently goes for about ~$180. Even something like sub $100 will be hard to achieve before 2026. Barring over supply of NAND which causes price to drop to irregular level.

Speed on the other hand seems to be limited by controller and interconnect. We should see a PCI-E 6.0 SSD capable of ~30GB/s and I wont be surprised if PCI-E 7.0 are already shipping by 2026.

Most price projection on SSD vs HDD cost uses TCO ( Total Cost of ownership ), which includes power and workload generally speaking flavours SSD. I dont know about others but I only care about cost / GB.

unixhero2• 5 years ago

Great writeup.

Planning for Servers in 2022 and Beyond

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