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Blade servers at home

TheThirdMan

TheThirdMan

Member
Hey guys,

I'm slowly building a render farm at home for 3d rendering and I was initially looking at getting some i7 micro atx PCs to populate it. However eBay has been flooded with decomissioned xeon westmere L5639 (6c/12t/2.13ghz), apparently from facebook's most recent server upgrade.

They're really cheap for the power you get- a 2u 4 blade enclosure, with 48gb ram per blade is being sold for about £1000 from the US (I'm sure postage will be a lot to get to the UK). A dual L5639 setup seems to give about 125% of the power of a single i7 3930k for less than half the price for a complete setup (no gfx needed).

So i was wondering, would it be mad to get one of these and a small 12u/9u server rack on wheels to house it? Or is there not enough power on my home power grid to power these (as far as i know, the xeon L series are 60w parts?). I'd just get win7pro licenses for them and manage them manually through remote desktop connection as I do for my couple of PCs on the render farm at the moment. Are there any other considerations I need to think of?

Thanks!
 
Shipping a 2U server across the Atlantic does seem pretty mad to me. Quick quote from Fedex showed ~$800 from California to London assuming that it weighs about 85 lbs.
 
Yeah I know but UK used prices are crazy. And there's no L5639 CPUs in the UK. They seemed to have been entirely made for US servers. Even if it comes to £1500, it's still much much cheaper than an equivalent in the UK. It would come to about £350 per blade with postage, compared to about £1000 in the UK.
 
Nope. Sure, two nodes cost $1000.

You're forgetting the blade chassis.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13238_na/13238_na.pdf

A c3000 chassis is a couple grand.

I'd be more interested in something like this:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1211532/build-log-4p-amd-opteron-6174s-supermicro-h8qgl-if-folding-rig

If you really want to rack mount, you should be able to build 1u servers with consumer grade components for under a grand apiece. And if you hunt for used stuff, you might be able to get some 2P AMD system for not much more money. MOAR COARS indeed.
 
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Rendering farm? I would build a CUDA processing farm. For the price of a blade you could put together a couple of cheap pc's with high end Gpus.

Servers don't really require any more power than a PC. The advantage is though you can go with a higher voltage and draw less amps.
 
Thanks for the responses guys.

dave_the_nerd: As far as I know, the dell 6100 isn't a blade as such (as in not like the 16 blade HP enclosures). I don't think it requires a seperate enclosure as most blades do. Or at least, the one listed on ebay comes in it's own 2u enclosure with PSU and connectors for all 4 servers inside. Dell don't sell it as blades, just as "4 nodes in a 2u enclosure": http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/poweredge-c6100/pd

oynaz: This was my main concern. It would be 8x60w CPUs running at 100%. I believe the dell 6100 has a single 1400w PSU that powers all 4 blades though.

rudder: It's going to be used for vray and mental ray, both CPU based renderers! Otherwise i'd definitely consider this.
 
1400 watt should be fine for a single phase - most places in Europe you can draw 2000 watt from one 24/7 without isseus. Just don't use it for making coffee etc. at the same time.
 
Hehe. Well I'm not too sure about it now. I asked the same question in the ServeTheHome forums and they pointed out that these nodes produce a huge amount of noise because of their very small fans running at very high speeds. I don't have a spare room to put it either so I think I might wait till i do.
 
TheThirdMan said:
Hehe. Well I'm not too sure about it now. I asked the same question in the ServeTheHome forums and they pointed out that these nodes produce a huge amount of noise because of their very small fans running at very high speeds. I don't have a spare room to put it either so I think I might wait till i do.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. You do NOT want to cohabitate the same room (or really floor) as a rackmount server

<--- Just got back from working in a data center for 3 days. Not easy on the ears.
 
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