Servers

[Talamakara]

Hey all.

I was looking through some of the servers you were building and I wanted to say i'm impressed. People like @MyNameIsNicola & @raid0yolo and so many others who have made almost works of art out of their server builds.

I've lost count of the PCs i've built over the years and servers I've repaired for work. But i have never bought or built my own, so time to change that.

Where do you ladies and gentlemen pick up some of these gorgeous looking servers? (Like Nicola's below)  Most of my contacts have nothing anywhere near this nice.

On 6/19/2016 at 6:55 AM, MyNameIsNicola said:

 

 

 

[GDRRiley]

supper micro, 45 drive just to name a few are companies who make rack mount servers.

[Talamakara]

looking them up now. Thx

[Talamakara]

What are your thoughts on why you wouldn't use a supermicro for home use?

[ARikozuM]

4 minutes ago, Talamakara said:

What are your thoughts on why you wouldn't use a supermicro for home use?

If it's for home or small business use, I'm partial to StarTech and Rosewill server racks and enclosures. For a board, what are you looking to do?

[Talamakara]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

If it's for home or small business use, I'm partial to StarTech and Rosewill server racks and enclosures. For a board, what are you looking to do?

Home use. To start with it will be primarily storage. But that's why I'm looking into this. If all I'm building is a storage system, a small CPU,  couple gigs of RAM and basic display card would be more than enough. But if i want to do anything more later on, I may look into building something I can use for years to come. Something I can add a couple GTX1080s or more RAM. Whichever.

[GDRRiley]

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/w3ntgL something like that

[Talamakara]

7 minutes ago, JaredM54 said:

Supermicro servers are in my experiences much louder than alternatives. Like @ARikozuM said I think your best option would be to get a case from StarTech and go from there.

I'm not really worried about noise, in fact to be honest, noise is the least of my concerns.

[ARikozuM]

These are my servers.

 

Currently http://pcpartpicker.com/list/jgcbXH

Previously http://pcpartpicker.com/list/NbVcYr

 

The Asrock C255 is a great board if you want just a NAS but I found myself limited by the Intel Atom so I upgraded to the "Currently" for my Steam server so that multiple people can play off the one machine.

 

Edit: Just noticed that I never put my server's GPU's. It houses a reference Titan Black from EVGA.

[Talamakara]

@GDRRiley  @ARikozuM @JaredM54

 

Thanks for the pointers, that's pointed me into a good start. My first choice in the end is to decide between a storage server and power server. 

If you don't mind me asking, where do you have your servers located? I designed my house to have my rack in the back of my garage. Winter here is fairly cool and summers not that hot so the garage never really warms up.

[ARikozuM]

13 minutes ago, Talamakara said:

@GDRRiley  @ARikozuM @JaredM54

 

Thanks for the pointers, that's pointed me into a good start. My first choice in the end is to decide between a storage server and power server. 

If you don't mind me asking, where do you have your servers located? I designed my house to have my rack in the back of my garage. Winter here is fairly cool and summers not that hot so the garage never really warms up.

My cabinet is in the garage (it's toasty but it's managed) and cables from the switch were routed through the attic and dropped where needed. Best pointer I can give you for a home server (VM or storage) is planning. Once you're done planning, make a plan, etc.

Make sure you get a rack with feet, as well as wheels, if possible. It'll save you the backache.

[Talamakara]

6 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

My cabinet is in the garage (it's toasty but it's managed) and cables from the switch were routed through the attic and dropped where needed. Best pointer I can give you for a home server (VM or storage) is planning. Once you're done planning, make a plan, etc.

Make sure you get a rack with feet, as well as wheels, if possible. It'll save you the backache.

lol unfortunately mine only has feet, no wheels, so already suffered the backache lol. But i only paid a hundred bucks for a full sizes rack and it's not so bad when i take the sides off lol. And I had cat6 drawn when i built the house so the wiring is already in place.

[ARikozuM]

13 minutes ago, Talamakara said:

lol unfortunately mine only has feet, no wheels, so already suffered the backache lol. But i only paid a hundred bucks for a full sizes rack and it's not so bad when i take the sides off lol. And I had cat6 drawn when i built the house so the wiring is already in place.

Good call on the wiring. I had to go to the attic myself with a gun crimper after seeing so many spiders.

Find out what your needs are and it should plan itself.

 

VM for gaming=GPU and LimeTech UnRAID.

Storage=Lots of drives and a nice passive board.

 

If you're needing more help feel free to ask.

[Talamakara]

9 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Good call on the wiring. I had to go to the attic myself with a gun crimper after seeing so many spiders.

Find out what your needs are and it should plan itself.

 

VM for gaming=GPU and LimeTech UnRAID.

Storage=Lots of drives and a nice passive board.

 

If you're needing more help feel free to ask.

Thank you. much appreciated

[GDRRiley]

1 hour ago, Talamakara said:

@GDRRiley  @ARikozuM @JaredM54

 

Thanks for the pointers, that's pointed me into a good start. My first choice in the end is to decide between a storage server and power server. 

If you don't mind me asking, where do you have your servers located? I designed my house to have my rack in the back of my garage. Winter here is fairly cool and summers not that hot so the garage never really warms up.

I have a server in my room but it only runs minecraft. I don't have a home NAS have consider it but I don't have the money to build one. 

[scottyseng]

7 hours ago, Talamakara said:

What are your thoughts on why you wouldn't use a supermicro for home use?

They are pretty loud. They usually have proprietary systems (Proprietary hot swap fans and PSUs, but the PSUs are really nice). I have a Supermicro 4U 24 drive chassis like in your original picture, but they're really solid on quality. However, the newer SuperMicro servers are quieter (They use Platinum 80+ PSUs and lower RPM fans...though you have to check first). You could drop the chassis on the floor and the floor would probably get damaged...I couldn't take the noise so I removed the stock Supermicro fans and replaced them with a lot of BeQuiet fans (I have the server in my room). I finally got a UPS unit from Eaton for power loss protection, and that's not exactly quiet either, great quality though.

 

I do recommend getting a server cabinet, these servers and UPS units are really heavy.

[Talamakara]

On 7/10/2016 at 1:04 AM, scottyseng said:

They are pretty loud. They usually have proprietary systems (Proprietary hot swap fans and PSUs, but the PSUs are really nice). I have a Supermicro 4U 24 drive chassis like in your original picture, but they're really solid on quality. However, the newer SuperMicro servers are quieter (They use Platinum 80+ PSUs and lower RPM fans...though you have to check first). You could drop the chassis on the floor and the floor would probably get damaged...I couldn't take the noise so I removed the stock Supermicro fans and replaced them with a lot of BeQuiet fans (I have the server in my room). I finally got a UPS unit from Eaton for power loss protection, and that's not exactly quiet either, great quality though.

 

I do recommend getting a server cabinet, these servers and UPS units are really heavy.

Thank you very much for the information. I do already have the server cabinet thankfully and all this will be going in my garage, which is already wired for this purpose. What i do really want to thank you for is reminding me of Eaton. I haven't dealt with them in years and can probably get a good deal on a ups, thx.

 

On 7/9/2016 at 7:38 PM, GDRRiley said:

I have a server in my room but it only runs minecraft. I don't have a home NAS have consider it but I don't have the money to build one. 

I have never played mine craft lol

 

 

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, Talamakara said:

Thank you very much for the information. I do already have the server cabinet thankfully and all this will be going in my garage, which is already wired for this purpose. What i do really want to thank you for is reminding me of Eaton. I haven't dealt with them in years and can probably get a good deal on a ups, thx.

Yeah, I got the 9130 2000VA UPS unit, it's extremely heavy (80 pounds) and I would never ever want to touch both ends of the battery (72V DC). It is kind of loud, but it does double online conversion (it converts the AC to DC and then back to AC for your hardware). It surprised me how much my power fluctuates from 110V to 120V. I did have to get used to sleeping with this thing on while it's in my room (It's 48dB while on). I have it under 400watts of load (My PC and server...and it's at 20% total capacity with a run time of 40 minutes).