Researchers have built server prototypes that re-use old components | Hacker News Reader

Researchers have built server prototypes that re-use old components

spectrum.ieee.org

48 pointsrbanffy43 comments

I find a lot of 10 year old Dell PowerEdge servers for basically free these days, some loaded with 128gb+ RAM. They work perfectly well with TrueNAS, pfSense, or even more powerful stuff. If you dont need a thousand cores, I always suggest them to people. Otherwise they end up in the dump..

Would love to know where, I want to convince friends they should get a home server, even if its just to use it as a NAS

99% of people will be better served by a single consumer PC instead of enterprise gear, don't convince them to buy a poweredge!

Especially if they want to run it for a desktop use. Decades ago I was running a small data center operation and would sell our old servers into the local Linux community. Had a guy buy one and then bring it back, dissatisfied with the graphics performance. "Like, whatddya mean, it runs the serial console at 19.2k..."

Yep. I am very satisfied with my do-almost-everything Lenovo M80S gen3. It came with an i7-12700 (12 core 20 thread) and I've dropped in 96GB memory, a 10gb network card, and an LSI HBA connected to a used SAS disk shelf.

It runs a dozen VMs and sits almost idle most of the time unless I'm experimenting with CPU LLMs. My one quibble is that it's small form factor and has limited PCIe lanes so installing a GPU is complicated.

The whole setup including the M80S, the disk shelf, an old Brocade network switch, a Unifi NVR, and 12 spinning rust disks uses about 200W total, which is about $30/month in electricity.

An old laptop can make a great homelab server if you don't need that much processing power. It's quiet, and it's got a built-in KVM and battery backup.

OOBM is a must have.

In a data center, sure. At home it's much less interesting and you can fake it with a NanoKVM or PiKVM for fairly cheap. Also a lot of "business" desktops with Intel processors will come with vPro, which is almost but not quite the same as a true IPMI.

if you absolutely must, you can still buy standard form factor mobos from supermicro or asrock with a BMC and put them in a standard, quiet desktop case

Supermicro has as many standard sized boards as not. (Comment for readers)

Apart from eBay and specialized reseller websites you can actually find some good deals on used enterprise gear onAmazon through third party stores. I've bought a few different things and had excellent results universally. The real trick is just knowing what to search for, which servers or computers are popular in enterprise and on the end of their lifecycle. Dell, HP and Lenovo servers and mini PCs that are sold to enterprise and are a couple generations old are what to look for.

I got 3x Dell R720 2U servers off ebay a year or so ago, they were $300-ish landed. Dual 6 core CPUs, 256GB RAM, no drives. I got 2 of them for work for our dev/stg cluster, and the price was so good I decided to get one to set up a homelab.

What does it cost to actually run them though? It must be pretty costly

With these kind of servers you want to look at the idle draw. As a homeserver that is probably your 80-90% use case. Some of them draw a significant amount at idle as they are not configured to run that way. The next thing to look at is fans. They can be rather loud (but can sometimes be configured to run slower and less loud). Also many of them are rackmount items. So you will want to think about how to stack your machines. You can buy used racks or a halfrack or just dump them on a table somewhere. Also sometimes you have to worry about the power supply. Sometimes they use different power cables than what a normal house would use.

I personally moved about 10 years ago to a very simple setup using a intel nuc. The idle is in the 5-10w range and max 45-65. I was using something that was idle 100-200. It shaved off about 15-30 bucks off my power bill per month when I did it plus a couple of other items in the house that had very poor idle. I am planning to move back to something a bit more interesting. But the specs to keep an eye on is the idle and max draw. For me I want something modest. But if you go all out and drop a couple 4090s in there and a decent xeon or threadripper it can get up there. Also keep in mind some of them have extra interesting things like fiber channel cards or some sort of infrastructure fabric ports (or lots of sata). They are not 0 but do add into the cost. So you may want to look how to disable them if you are not using them.

So something that is ide 5w would be about 5 dollars per year idle and about 65 form my max load. My price per kwh is 11 cents. Pretty sure the formula is ((number of watts)/1000)24365*(price per kwh). That should get you the yearly cost. Just run the calc for max and min load.

So you may be better served buying something newer that uses less power in the long run. Short term though playing with old hardware can be cost effective and fun.

In my experience, power is not the issue; it's the noise. Servers are LOUD.

It extremely depends on how old the thing is. Generally the older they are, the more power they take. Machines were not efficient back then.

I have a poweredge from 2015 or so. Dual Xeon processors and all. It tops out at 500W absolute max. Though, idle is at least 75-100W. It's not too bad, I think I calculated <$100 a year. Obviously you can get some amount of virtual server for that much money, but I like being able to lay hands on a physical box. Plus the blinkenlights and HDD chatter noises are nice.

If you're getting one that requires 3-phase power, you should probably think again. :-)

Reminds me of the German movie "23":

https://www.film-rezensionen.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/2...

Where are you finding these systems?

You'll find them readily available on Ebay, but there are also multiple companies that specialize in refurbishing servers (which usually will allow you to configure your actual needs - but this will be slightly more expensive in my experience).

Someone just moving decommissioned servers from a data center to new users without doing anything with the equipment in between allows you to find decent deals if you're looking for something to put in a rack.

Be aware that rack servers are usually rather power hungry, so they might be expensive to run over time.

I found eBay to be strictly an USA thing, plus Canada at best for those who are OK with driving for half a day, or even two.

I have the app installed and the shipping costs to Eastern Europe where I live often surpass 50% of the price of the tech itself.

I'd love to reuse. A lot of us out there who are still oldschool-ish and can work miracles with older tech. But I am not about to spend the same money I'd spend on simply building a PC with EATX case and the ability to shove 12 HDDs in there. I'd still end up spending more on the local market, mind you, but we're looking at 10-15% maximum and I don't find that a worthy difference to wait 3 weeks for an older server, especially with a very high likelihood of also having to pay 20% of the value of it to customs.

Similar region here, and there are unaffiliated "outlet" stores with their own websites which you can search-engine for, at least for workstations: I've never tried with servers. Also the discounts might be more in the decent than jump-to-buy territory. If you live in the Allegro land (i.e. Visegrad countries) or can import, you could also look here.

I expect there would be more of a glut of this stuff where there were lots of server farms and web tech businesses. If the scale was much smaller in your area compared to the US, then of course less servers are discarded.

You'll find vendors in Germany, Spain, etc. within the EU. Not much I can say about customs - so you might want to check local recyclers. There's usually some sort of recycling program for old hardware that gets cleaned out and re-sold, but it'll all depend on your country's incentives.

Whether it's worth it will depend on what you're looking for.

Yeah, I came to the conclusion that I should familiarize myself with the local market as well. Not very easy but not that difficult either.

Still not at all important for me, not until I move in in my own place which is due in 2-3 years. But after that happens I'll definitely want a few servers in a closet.

Should you know any former CTO's or technology entrepreneurs you could ask them?

As one myself I possess pallets of nearly new equipment that had zero issues in function and was only decommissioned per security compliance requirements involving End Of Life equipment. Many informed consumers are now complaining about the forced hardware upgrade for Windows 11 but this EOL revenue technique has existed for decades given Payment Card Industry (P.C.I.) compliance.

Aren't they very loud?

Isn't there a second hand market for enterprises?

On supermicro boxes, one can download their IPMI configuration utility to adjust fan settings from full-blast to temperature-controlled, which reduces the noise to tolerable levels so long as it's not running at 100% load all the time.

On Dells this can be done in the BIOS.

The Dell machines can be quite quiet if you don't run them to full capacity. I have one in my office and it's basically silent.

I feel like those would be great for running things like a websocket server that just broadcasts events.

I have a rack in a datacenter with mostly 5 year old Supermicro servers. We bought them all off of Ebay for no more than $400 each. They work great and we have more compute and bandwidth for our workloads for less than $1000 a month. If we used one of the could providers it would be many thousands of dollars per month. I understand not everyone has the skills to run their own rack but the value of doing so is totally worth it.

I imagine with Linux this might be less of an issue than Windows, but at least with Windows you see that Dell etc stop supporting newer Windows Server versions on older servers.

Regardless, security issues in out of band management systems might also not get patched.

What skills do you need to run your own rack?

That depend on context. Is it your own rack in your own data center or rented space in someone else data center? A rack in a AC cooled office room? What uptime is required? What redundancy is required? What are the network requirements? Any environmental concerns (power loss, flooding, extreme heat overpowering the ac, travel distance for personal)? How do you want to manage personal during night/weekends/holidays? What is the distance to shops that has spare parts? Access to backup power?

Most of it can be fairly simple to solve or risk manage if the company is small, people are flexible, and the uptime requirements are not that strict or there is sufficient backup solutions. If its just owning your own rack in a rented space in a data center then the difference is fairly minor, as well as the cost savings.

I for one never learned to do it.

IMO there's a big historical and archival value in the idea to start cataloguing such knowledge.

Agreed! And there's this space in the middle there...Because at the dayjob/enterprise side of things there's the concepts of hypervisor vendors, CoLos (co-locating servers in data centers), and full-blown enterprise on-premise...and of course other end of spectrum is homelabbing/that is self-hosting stuff at home either on consumer or old server grade computers...but what if i want to have a single server for my own self-hosting use but in a tiny data center/colo, but which is not outlandish, and i would maintain it myself? I dont know what we'd call that space: mini-CoLo, or self-data centering, or remote-homelabbing? but, i'm sure there's a gap in knowledge there, and would be great to learn more. :-)

The one downside I've found (other than noise) running a super old supermicro at home is the power consumption is nowhere near as good as the modern hardware. But my server is _really_ old, some dual socket xeon thing I got super cheap.

Weird question, if you put an old, inefficient server somewhere sensible, could it reasonably pull double-duty as a heater? If you're pumping a kilowatt or two into it, that's enough to warm up a decent sized room!

I have a hybrid water heater that uses a heat pump to suck heat out of the air to warm my water.

I placed my homelab next to it so that at least my waste heat gets used in the most efficient manner that I have.

I guess... I have mine in a fairly small room and that room definitely gets warm, but actually harvesting that heat in a meaningful way in a useful room I dont think so.

And if it's still too cold, start mining bitcoin?

https://heatbit.com/

It's not as efficient as a heat pump nor as cheap as burning natural gas but yeah you can use it as a space heater

I was hoping this would be an effort to re-use components that don't change as much between generations - such as power supplies or VRM components.

> The reused components are 4th and 5th generation RAM modules, as well as solid state drives

Reusing memory sticks is worth a paper about green IT now? Sigh. I was hoping for a bit more...

(Come on, at least reuse PSUs and disk backplanes/caddies as well...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com