Low power budget servers...

[unijabnx2000]

The plan so far is to stack ITX motherboards and power them with PicoPSUs, which will be powered from an ATX PSU.

I thought about getting 24pin splitters to be able to run them all from the ATX PSU, but the cost ended up being more than going with PicoPSUs. All 4 systems running shouldn't use but around 60-90 watts from the ATX PSU.

In total the plan is to have 3x N3150 motherboards and one J1900 system.
The J1900 system will remain my router/firewall and the other three should (over time) become an openstack setup. (1 controller and 2 compute nodes)

Probably gonna make ducting (aka case) around the stacked motherboards so I can use a few fans to blow air across the boards even though they are all passively cooled. For some reason no one makes a case that does what I want here lol.


I do wish the N3150 boards had dual nics but I havent found anything in that power/price range that does.

 

[HankB]

2W difference between N3150 and J1900 so I wonder what motivates you to choose one J1900 and three N3150s.

FWIW I have a J1900 running my NAS which includes two 3TB drives and boots from a laptop drive. According to the Kill A Watt it uses 34W.

 

[unijabnx2000]

The J1900 board has dual NIC and an IPMI nic.
It is my CentOS router/firewall.
It wont be running openstack.
The sata ports on it are Sata2 while the ports on the N3150 motherboards are Sata3.

 

[HankB]

I see, that makes sense. Not the processors at all but the peripherals.

 

[wagex]

why not just use one of the low power machines for the router then use a more powerful i3 or pentium for everything else just run some virtual machines, would save money in inital purchases and probably use less power.

 

[unijabnx2000]

why not just use one of the low power machines for the router then use a more powerful i3 or pentium for everything else just run some virtual machines, would save money in inital purchases and probably use less power.

Aren't most of the newest i3's like 50+watts?

The N3150 cpus are ~6 watts each. I also wanted the chance to have more than one node in my Openstack setup.
The cost of an i3, MB, and 32GB of ram would have likely been $350+.
Total for all three N3150 MBs with 16GB ram each, I have spent almost exactly $350. (+another $75 for PicoPSUs) (that is collectively 12 cores and 48GB RAM)

 

[wagex]

i dont think they are, my server runs on an i3-2120 so an older one, with 3x2tb hitachi drives and an SSD 5 fans and a bronze psu and it pulls less than 50w from the wall. il have to hook it up to my kill a watt again to be sure.

have you done any from the wall testing? seems like they use more than that

and i have an i3 with 32gb and mobo in my cart for $302 could move up to and i5 for not much more and have twice the power. though would bring up power draw a bit. but a single core is probably = to a whole n3150 i havent looked too hard at benches, and vm's are more efficient at dividing that power among the machines. eg if two machines are sitting idle the third vm could use all 4 cores for a process vice versa. same with ram you can have vm's that use just as much memory as they need and you can prioritize some over others.
you forgot to add the what like $40 for each pico psu? i havent looked at prices for a while

idk, to each their own was just a suggestion, albeit probably a bit late too lol.

edit: i also didnt realize you wanted to do an openstack setup lol whoops that stuff is all way over my head. i should have read a little better i thought you were just using them all for different stuff.

 

[unijabnx2000]

I separated the router from the rest since I decided it can run off a USB drive and only needs 4GB of memory.
It shouldnt need the fan, but I had it laying around, so yeah.

That means all the N3150 boards get 16GB.
I believe I will attempt to do 1 controller node, 1 storage node, and 1 compute node.


Its time for a few pictures....





The router/dns/dhcp freshly setup

 

[unijabnx2000]

i dont think they are, my server runs on an i3-2120 so an older one, with 3x2tb hitachi drives and an SSD 5 fans and a bronze psu and it pulls less than 50w from the wall. il have to hook it up to my kill a watt again to be sure.

have you done any from the wall testing? seems like they use more than that [=CONFIG]177836[/]

and i have an i3 with 32gb and mobo in my cart for $302 could move up to and i5 for not much more and have twice the power. though would bring up power draw a bit. but a single core is probably = to a whole n3150 i havent looked too hard at benches, and vm's are more efficient at dividing that power among the machines. eg if two machines are sitting idle the third vm could use all 4 cores for a process vice versa. same with ram you can have vm's that use just as much memory as they need and you can prioritize some over others.
you forgot to add the what like $40 for each pico psu? i havent looked at prices for a while

idk, to each their own was just a suggestion, albeit probably a bit late too lol.

edit: i also didnt realize you wanted to do an openstack setup lol whoops that stuff is all way over my head.

Yeah forgot to add the Picos, they were 25 each.
I wish I had a power meter for the wall to measure overall usage.
Im betting all 4 machines should use way less than 60 watts combined.
I know the TDP rating in intel ark site for the i3 6100 is 51watts.

I have a couple 12v batteries from some old APC UPS laying so I might do some endurance testing later on to see how long they last.