Minimalist Hyperscale Servers for the Rest of Us
nextplatform.com
nextplatform.com
Unless Intel is cutting the consumer a deal here (fat chance), I think it's safe to say this is some paid shilling.
The most direct comparison would probably be Supermicro MegaDC and various QCT servers that also use OCP mezz cards.
I've used and enjoyed their products, but this seems a bit too close to being an ad.
Still, the "rest of us" in the title is more like "you're not Facebook" than home hobbyist or small company.
It’s more the opposite. If you only have a few servers you might want dual NICs for multihoming redundancy. OTOH if you have a lot of servers you don’t do multihoming redundancy because it adds a lot of complexity and cost to the network, so you’ll just let the whole rack die because you have thousands more.
Or you want to have your box to have multiple addresses in case one NIC or switch goes bad.
Letting the whole rack die and recovering elsewhere sounds nice, but you lose all of the in-flight requests. You still need to be prepared for losing whole racks from time to time, but it's way simpler to migrate away from hosts that lost one out of two NICs than one out of ones.
> One day your rack will fail and your software will need to deal with it gracefully enough. IMO solve it at the application level don’t make the network try to do it for you.
I agree, the rack is going to fail, and you have to be able to handle it. It's a question of what the consequences are, and how often you have them.
Without a radically atypical socket setup, you're going to at least lose the state of clients connected to hosts in the rack that fails. That will, at least, cause significant communication delays while the connection loss is determined. Probably your clients are well behaved and will reconnect and retry their requests. Most requests will be retried in a timely fashion, but some of your clients are going to have an independent network failure around the same time, and their requests are going to suffer a major delay (I'm mobile oriented, so I'm trying to send a message before I go into the dead zone, etc).
Like you said, it's going to happen sometimes anyway. Redundant networks and redundant power only mitigate outages, they don't eliminate them, and there's always room for human error. But, I would pay several times the cost of the network to be able to have a significantly reduced frequency of outages.
You'll still have far fewer catastrophic failures if you run redundant hardware.
I can picture a few cases where multiple NICs aren’t critical, but I’d still want them if for nothing more than isolated control plane.
They're making a single motherboard for the 5 server configurations, so that's got to support everything they think will make it sell. It's more minimal than their normal lineup anyway.