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Comment by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | Hacker News Reader

What does "1N" mean?

It means there's one node in that chassis, eg here's a 2U4N product: https://www.servethehome.com/dell-emc-poweredge-c6525-review...

Seems to be right, but as far as I can tell almost nobody uses this terminology and it's pretty rude of the article not to explain.

Like, this article is one of the top results for 2U1N, plus some dell pages and random jank.

I’ve been using fans bigger than 80mm in desktop machines for a long time. Is there a reason to prefer 2U1N over the equally dense 4U2N shape? Obviously 2U is widely available and 4U dual node is exotic, but I imagine that Cloudflare has plenty of scale for a custom form factor if it would benefit them.

Thank you for flagging! We've updated the post with a brief definition of 1N (as you and others have noted, it means there is one server node per chassis).

I mean this very positively, not condescendingly and I'm very much not trying to preach or push, but I've found that this sort of question is exactly the sort that I benefit a lot from handing to GPT to answer for me:

https://chat.openai.com/share/37774e90-a271-4f6c-a5d3-3937e9...

I was curious too because I hadn't heard '1N' in a long time so I did the above and you might like the answer it gave me too!

Based on your sibling's comment chatgpt has it wrong.

>N: This refers to the redundancy of the power and cooling systems. "N" stands for "Need" or "Normal." In data center design, "N" is used to denote the capacity required to support the IT load. "1N" implies a single path for power and cooling, with no built-in redundancy. In other words, each component necessary to support the IT equipment is present, but there is no backup if one of these components fails.

I'm pretty sure this is wrong. N means "node", so a 2U4N is a 2U chassis that houses 4 servers. I'm pretty ambivalent for this reason for using chatgpt for research in things I cannot easily verify. I will admit this is a scarily convincing hallucination.

ChatGPT is a master troll, lol. I don't know why people take it seriously, it's just a parrot that likes to make stuff up.

This sort of thing honestly feels like the historical state of affairs with Wikipedia... paying too much attention to it early on was probably a bad idea, but as things progressed, many folks who had ossified into distrusting it were making the opposite mistake of paying too little attention.

I'm definitely trying to balance it out! Apologies to all for the mistake here!

I think this is completely wrong from ChatGPT...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com