It's doable, but you need to spend time to optimize the noise factor:
- If you need many cores but can live with lower clock speeds, you can underclock.
- 1U servers will be noisy no matter what. 2U is already more manageable. 4Us are the best.
- GPUs will be noisy, no real solution around that. High heat production, and they hinder the air flow, so the front fans will have to spin faster. I physically remove GPUs from chassis when I'm not actively using them.
- There are small-size soundproof server cabinets that can easily solve this problem. They're very expensive though.
- Depending on the server, you can directly control fan speed at the firmware level. This needs careful control if you don't want to destroy your hardware and/or burn down your place.
- The pandemic makes all this much harder. I used to keep things running lightly during the night and full blast during the day when everyone was out of the house. I saved tons of money, compared to what I would have paid on any cloud platform. Now that we're home 24/7 it's not so worth it anymore.
Also this is all worth it if you actually enjoy playing with the hardware, in that case the money you put into this brings you both fun and cheap compute. If the setup is a chore for you, don't do it, it probably won't be worth your hourly rate.
Fun fact: the noise/space/aesthetics factors are referred to in the community as the "WAF" - Wife Acceptance Factor ;-)
I work in Aerospace so I spend entirely too much time around pilots, amongst whom it's a common thing to refer to Wife Acceptance as Tower Clearance. E.g.:
>I'm thinking about getting one of those big green eggs
>Nice. Do you think Tower will let you?
>I won't let her see it until it's too late
Etc
edit: yes, get the version with the Xeon E5 series. Preferably already with the double CPU configuration.
edit2: yes, and also don't get the first version that has Xeon X-series. It will not perform well enough for semi-modern homelab workloads.
They can be used for structural purposes as well, its perfectly possible to make a sturdy set of bookshelves with 4x z620s and 4 scaffold planks.
You made my day! That's the primarily limiting factor in my "bedroom datacenter" expansion :D
While WAF capacity tends to be fairly constant over time, careful strategic planning can ensure sufficient WAF capacity to avoid significant restrictions on side project activity.
(I don’t use riser cables FWIW)
A short 2 inches riser, surrounded by a grounded metal sheet, might work.
I would have thought anything that restricts sound would also impede air flow.
I could never afford one (they're also super heavy so you have to be careful your floor can take it) but I assume the idea is to replace the airflow noise of many small fans with a few much larger ones.
They can be stacked, are readily available and seem very reliable.
ESXi runs nicely on a Nuc, and it’ll do a load of VMs with plenty of resources (the Nucs will take 64gb). But the price for that is probably 5-10x what you are describing.
Indeed the reason why I do what I do!
I can have 10x of them for the cost of 1 of your Nucs.
For example, my latest purchase was $15 per tablet with 8Gb of RAM, delivered. Add 2x brand new M2 2230 drives which cost about $20 apiece, and each node costs about $55.
> What are you running on them?
Sharded databases and Ceph clusters mostly. Each shard uses very little power (and does not run hot) but has 2x nvme in mirror. With raid10 f2 on linux or zfs mirror on bsd you gain in read speed on top of the raid1 safety.
Sometimes I add USB external storage: tablets often have 2 USBC ports, so $100 gives an extra 8Tb for warm storage. For HDD, USBC is not a restricting factor anymore.
Now I am trying VMs: with a dedicated NVMe, IO performance is good, but there is not enough RAM yet. When 16Gb becomes the new normal, that will be much easier.
I’ve lately moved to a second hand Dell SFF office PC, as it gave me more expansion and even faster compute. Sits next to the router in the lounge, the girlfriend forgets it’s even there!
To cool it, he drilled through the external brick wall several times and fitted exhaust fans.
His hall sounded like standing behind a 747.
If it rained, he often ended up tripping the fuses.
</end of anecdote>
I'm not aware of the any other servers, switches or actively cooled equipment tried to do that.
IBM BladeCenter H is the worst offender: "Is acoustic management enabled? No? OK, everything is at full speed, then".
Here's an idea of what it was like:
We had a lot of them, with full configuration, at full load. Go, figure.
They can generate a lot of heat though.
To be fair, they ARE impressively CPU dense
"Proper" 1U servers feel more like a thing for larger places, where density starts to matter more. Not sure why so many comments here focus on 1U.
However with an iLO or iDRAC license, they're joy to administer and use. They're also very reliable too.
For home use servers, if you want 1U form factor, you can take a look at Dell's shallow 1U servers. They're pretty modestly powered but small, I think relatively silent and easy to maintain.
Higher end servers have some fun features like advanced BMCs and such, but they come with relevant price tags, power consumption and noise.
You can also look at SME tower servers.
But yeah as soon as you put an unsupported HDD or extension card in there, it'll assume the worst and spin everything full blast.
In an HPC environment that doesn't matter much, anyway. Heh.
In a 1U server, you're running 5-7 tandem mounted, counter rotating Delta fans which can spin up to 18KRPM. They're in a confined space, have big cores to drive them and they need to supply a blanket of airflow to get things cool.
Higher efficiency components and a good implicit airflow design affects much more than the fans themselves, since there's not much space to optimize the fan design itself compared to the airflow as a whole inside the server.
Moreover, more intelligent system management solutions with more sensors both inside the chips and on the motherboard allows the BMC to see the whole picture and manage these fans in a more informed manner.
I remember taking out ALL of the fans AND trying to put it under an arm chair and it was still the loudest thing in my apartment. Needless to say, I got rid of it not long after that.
There's not a lot of space left in a 1U server, and to get the right airflow, the airspeed has to be much much higher as what you'd get in a normal ATX case.
Can you replace it with quieter small fans, while maintaining good airflow? Sure sometimes. Is it ever going to be "quiet"? Not a chance.
More seriously: most switches will survive fine without fans if you don't use them too intensely (see eg https://www.reddit.com/r/Cisco/comments/3iu57s/home_lab_swit...)
I guess it depends on your workload and the specific hardware involved but using server hardware with quiet fans in a living room environment can certainly be achieved.
Fan diameter actually corresponds to server thickness. 1U use 4cm, 3U and 4U use 8 or 12cm. Power consumption stays the same, which means monsters like 1U Xeons come with like horizontal 8-unit array of a pair of contra-rotating 4cm 12V/0.5A(12V x 0.5A x 2 in series = 12W per unit) fans.
Noctua don’t make that kind of jet engines.
The hardware is probably much better now, if one pays attention, but still, it's a big gotcha.
Well, if you can put a few servers in there, you’re good!