NANOGers home data centers - What's in your closet?

Mon Aug 15 13:52:50 UTC 2011

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Charles N Wyble
<charles at knownelement.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I'm curious what other NANOGers have in their home compute centers? On
> the extreme end of course we have mr morris :)
> with his uber lab: http://smorris.uber-geek.net/lab.htm
>
>

I try to maximize cost-effectiveness wherever possible, thus I have
some extremely inexpensive solutions for the usual power/cooling
issues.  When I built my house, I drew in a 6'x6' room in my
unfinished basement, strategically located between the breaker panel
and nearest outside wall.

Crazy-huge cost savings: CyberPower CSW8RU RPS for the devices that
don't need to run continuously.  These devices pay for themselves
within a month or two, and the interface is Lynx-friendly.  The main
limitation is that they only handle 15A each at this price/model.

2x 20A and 2x 15A dedicated circuits w/appropriate Tripp-lite
rack-mounted surge suppressors.

Cooling & humidity control provided by Frigidaire FRA12EPT1 12,000 BTU
Portable Heat/Cool Air Conditioner.  This was incredibly inexpensive
and easy to install.  The key was to heavily insulate the 6" exhaust
duct and correctly run the drain line.

Half-rack and 3U wall rack from RackSolutions.

CyberPower UPSes for the devices that do need to remain on (batteries
last far longer than APC, in my experience).

Two VMware ESXi servers built from commodity parts from MicroCenter.
(Multiple physical Intel NICs with myriad vNICs.)

NAS from Synology with WD drives.  Between the omni-format media
server, the rsync services for server backups, and sleep
(power-saving) modes, this thing is an incredible value.

Filtering on an old physical server; recently converted from FreeBSD
to CentOS (multiple physical NICs).

Routing on borrowed gear from work (thus it changes regularly) and a
Vyatta instance.

Switching on an old Foundry 24-port (refurbished).  <-- I suspect this
is not power-efficient, but it's feature-rich and these things run
forever...

Local wireless on NetGear running DD-WRT. Considering moving to
OpenWRT since development seems a bit more active.

Home laptops (semi-recent Dells, bought refurbished from MicroCenter)
running Ubuntu LTS.  Bonus: Wife fully-accustomed to running on Ubuntu
-- the only Windows "box" is a VM that's usually suspended :D.

Bandwidth via Comcast; DOCSIS 3.0.

v6 via HE.