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Ask HN: Where do you put DIY servers?

11 points by kjsthree ↗ HN
Let's say I'm into getting 11M IOPS [1] and am ready to get my beast of a server online. Where do I put this? Do I just search for colocations in my area with 100Gbps+ connections?

I always love these DIY server articles and I'm curious about people really running this way. In reality, I'm sure you'd build this into a U[x] chassis with redundant power supplies and maybe NICs. From there I guess you build a second one for real redundancy and then you build a small box purely for load balancing in front of those aaaand down the rabbit hole we go. But, as a start, I'm wondering where you physically place this?

[1]: https://tanelpoder.com/posts/11m-iops-with-10-ssds-on-amd-threadripper-pro-workstation/

7 comments

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jtchang
You start looking at colos in your area that are within your parameters (as well as theirs).

The reason the box you linked doesn't get put in a colo is primarily power consumption and space. Colos charge mainly per amp. And that thing looks like it will draw a ton of power. Also some colos don't allow anything but standard racked computers. So you need to put it into a standard rack unit. This is primarily so they can standardize on cooling/airflow (generally racks have hot and cold aisles).

That said if you rent a whole rack you can probably get away with it. But then again it is expensive and you pay for transit as well.

Other options include at an office or even at home.

kjsthree
What does that guy actually do with the box then? There’s no way his home internet connection could keep it fed. I’m trying to imagine local uses for all that I/O.
kjsthree
Or maybe better said, there’s no way that box could feed the world over his home connection.
tanelpoder
The box is for experimentation & learning for fun and profit! :-)

When running some application on the box that processes & reduces the dataset (for example some analytics in RDBMS SQL), then the amount of data returned to the world would be much less than 66 GB/s. I have a 1 Gbit AT&T Fibre at my home(office), so could serve quite a lot through that (until AT&T starts complaining about the "unlimited" bandwidth really not being unlimited after some threshold :-)

But when not hosting stuff in a proper data centre with redundant internet connections, connection reliability would probably be the biggest issue. I've not had that many problems with reliability in the home-office (and occasional online training) usage context, but I'm pretty sure there'd be regular "hiccups" if I tried to serve something with high availability from here :-)

pickle-wizard
It all depends on your use case.

I have a couple of whitebox servers sitting in my office at home. I purpose went with tower servers as they are quieter than rack mount. Mine is just for lab stuff, so I don't need redundant power or anything like that.

Colo is another option, cost varies greatly from area to area. I've thought about doing it myself, but colo space in Austin is real expensive.

mbushey
Corporate Colo is an awesome small family owned business which I have used a few times. I have nothing but good things to say about them.
p0d
I keep my server at home. I used to look after colo servers. If you go colo try and find a fixed price for data transfer. Power is also a big factor in colo. You can generally get 1/4, 1/2 and full racks.