Planning for Servers in 2022 and Beyond | Hacker News Reader

Planning for Servers in 2022 and Beyond

servethehome.com

67 pointsvanburen36 comments

Something I didn't quite realise with the rise of "The Cloud"; many businesses aren't reselling their 3-5 year old Servers.

That notion only just hit me with the title, and I'm a little sad about it to be honest.

While this is certainly true, facebook, google, Microsoft, and a bunch of other hyperscale cloud providers still regularly dump hardware on ebay for great prices.

As many of them start migrating to more bespoke proprietary solutions I doubt this is going to continue.

A lot of these providers are part of the Open Compute project [0] that Facebook created in 2011 and all the hardware is open source. At least for FB, all the new hardware is part of that.

[0] https://www.opencompute.org/

Do they?

I was working for a big US tech company in the UK. They regularly use to give servers and computers for decommissioning/dismantling. Once I asked if I could get those servers and computers to give it to schools and students who could not afford to buy one. I was told that it is not legal to give company computer away. There are restrictions on giving company computers in the open market, even if it is free.

this is entirely a matter of policy and not "illegal"

source: used computers trade in California

Is a matter of policy and the reason for this policy is to avoid being sued.

Afaik, in uk, schools and the likes need to get warranties for everything "donated" in an effort to not become an e-waste dumping ground.

Same in Ireland. Even if we gave employees their own old laptop to keep, we were told this would possibly put the company on the hook for warranty claims.

Instead what they did with the old non-leased hardware was that they said we had to bring it back when we were done with transferring our old stuff over (wink wink). But of course this model is not possible with a completely different party.

Hyperscalers sell decommissioned equipment; they don't give it away for free.

That's super interesting, enjoyed reading it.

I am pondering of getting a good future-proof server Soon™ but I have my doubts about how cheap (or awfully expensive) this is going to be so I will likely settle for a refurbished Xeon E5 workstation (since I'd like less noise and the ability to cram it full of HDDs/SSDs).

I wonder if the coming of this new-age SSDs will herald a price drop in the classic 2.5" SSDs? I don't believe so because they will be viable for a long time in the future still but I am curious to hear other people's perspective?

What do you guys and girls think?

Markets like web hosting will eat any discounted 2.5” enterprise SSDs. Don’t even mention stuff like chia.

There is such a large market for 2.5” storage that I don’t think we are going to have a large discounted sell off, unlike say DDR4 ECC DIMMs

I really really wish I am wrong, but nothing in the current NAND industry roadmap ( known knowns ) and future technology improvement ( known unknowns ) suggest NAND's cost /bit will get substantially cheaper. Cheapest 2.5" 2TB SSD currently goes for about ~$180. Even something like sub $100 will be hard to achieve before 2026. Barring over supply of NAND which causes price to drop to irregular level.

Speed on the other hand seems to be limited by controller and interconnect. We should see a PCI-E 6.0 SSD capable of ~30GB/s and I wont be surprised if PCI-E 7.0 are already shipping by 2026.

Most price projection on SSD vs HDD cost uses TCO ( Total Cost of ownership ), which includes power and workload generally speaking flavours SSD. I dont know about others but I only care about cost / GB.

Really looking forward to reasonably priced ARM servers with modular/beefy RAM. I don't get the trend of everyone running RPi clusters with the tiny amount of RAM they have, how do you use that for anything serious?

https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

Nice, but that's still too expensive in my opinion for what you're getting. Sure it's 16 cores, but the speed of those cores isn't great. I'm not sure what the right price point is, but you're either at $40-80 for 2-4 core 4GB RAM or $500+ for tons of cores.

My ideal build is $100-200, 4-8 cores, bring your own RAM, mainline Linux support, and a preflashed u-boot SPI so my partitioning and install is BIOS/UEFI like.

Cant wait for all of those to arrive. We have a sort of stagnation in the past 4-5 years and only only just started moving again. Network, Storage and Compute.

For consumer I really hope we will get 5GBASE-T. Even if it is just one port on the Router would be better than 1Gbps port.

Fiber is easy if you buy fiber patch cables, and just coil up the excess. Copper just has limitations, I wouldn't be surprised if there's no real progress in copper networking in the next few years.

I believe some prefer Copper despite length limitations or interference, because it’s less power and heat compared to fiber and the receiver to translate the light.

2.5G/5G/10GBaseT is probably higher-power than fiber.

I've been considering getting fiber to connect two switches on opposite ends of my apartment. The distance is short enough that I could use a slim Ethernet cable, but even the slim ones are pretty noticeable. Fiber cables can be incredibly thin.

I did research, and the problem I found was that there is very little availability for fiber cables of alternative colors. Most of the cables I found that were the right type and thickness I wanted, I could only find in bright yellow that would stick out.

There are a few products like invisilight that are incredibly thin and almost clear which would be ideal. However, they're only sold in bulk to businesses so I could only find some on ebay. It felt too adventurous for me to pull the trigger.

Currently 5Ghz wifi is sufficient, but its bad enough that I refrain from doing anything that consumes a lot of bandwidth, like torrenting.

Do you have coax connections in each room? If so, is ethernet over coax an option?

I do not have coax. Power line ethernet is an option, but I've heard mixed stories about latency/loss.

The color of fibre optic cabling jackets typically signifies the type of mode/distance it supports, unlike CAT5/6 where it's insignificant. https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ColCodes.htm

It seems to me like 10Gbps is already “cheap enough” to use where it’s appropriate. DAC (copper) is crazy cheap and fiber/UTP are also pretty cheap. 30m (~100 ft) OM3 fiber is $25 retail; SFP+ 10G fiber modules are $20.

The modules and NICs are in the affordable range for network enthusiasts, yes. But I haven't been able to find 10GBase-T switches at consumer prices yet. Do you have some pointers/recommendations?

Mikrotik have 2-3 great 10GbE switches in the $250-$400 range, if memory serves.

Have a look at the Microtik CRS305-1G-4S+IN. 4 10Gbps SFP+ ports with an MSRP of $150 and a street price just under that.

For direct connections (NAS to VM host, for example), you can also forgo a switch and wire them directly on a private point-to-point network.

How do you connect fiber? I thought you need very expensive soldering tool which stopped me from looking at fiber for home network.

Buy pre-terminated fiber patch "cables". They have ends on them (LC is the common one) and plug in like pre-terminated Ethernet cables.

Terminating bulk fiber does require special tooling, but is generally not needed for a home installation.

I never thought about using Fibre at home. Especially when I have CAT6 cable already installed.

How does Pulling Pre-terminated fibre walks? Doing it the same as Copper cables? I thought fibre cable were more brittle which makes home installation a no go?

This is interesting because I guess most are like me, all fixated on Copper Ethernet and never once thought about Fibre!

They’re not as strong as copper UTP, but they’re not outrageously fragile either. If they get tangled or twisted in a data center application, you can tug on them as needed to disentangle them without worry.

I pulled finished fiber through conduit to my garage (fiber is much better than copper for detached buildings). That was an el, two 90s, a 45, and about 17 meters of straight conduit pulled with a poly line. Worked fine.

In a case like yours (assuming you have at least Cat6 copper UTP in the wall), I’d surely just buy the slightly more expensive RJ45 transceivers.

A minimal used 10Gbps switch from a cloud-provider grade mfg (arista, cisco, juniper) will run you ~5k, which is pretty expensive. But they are really loud and most people shouldn't put them in their homes.

Microtik is probably good enough for most home serving usage (honestly it would probably be good enough for a small cloud too), and is much cheaper, and way quieter.

I am still pondering buying a 10GbE Mikrotik switch. There are 1 or 2 models without a fan -- or such that ServeTheHome says don't make a lot of noise but I'd still be super hesistant to use those -- and I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Do you have any experience with them? Any pros and cons?

I've only ever configured a mikrotik router in the datacenter and it was a good experience. We did not wind up deploying it though so I can't speak to it's reliability, uptime, or anything.

PS hi pdimitar ;)

Dual 10gbe pcix costs usd 250 from China. It is already here.

Great writeup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com