How much power does it take? I've realized with some services it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.
If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear.
That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.
Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home.
I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good.
I recommend Backblaze B2 - $5 / TB, and supports s3's api.
A raspberry pi draws 2+ amps. Your dual Xeon server is drawing a lot more power. That said, typically you’d want to measure in watts because amps is relative. Eg a RPI is 2A at 5V while a computer is probably 5A at 120V - an order of magnitude more total energy consumed.
Also while bandwidth costs less in the cloud compute and storage is much cheaper if you host it locally. If you want a server to host your public website, do it in the cloud. If you want a file server for local use the price and performance benefits quickly overweigh the power cost. There also is the additional factor of having the equipment/data 100% under my control, which is very important to me.
Depending on your need (many apps just idle most of the time) a usff pc can make an excellent proxmox server.
Check out a Lenovo m920q, Dell Optiplex 7060, HP EliteDesk or ProDesk 800 series. They are easy enough to bump to 64G of ram and stack up as you need. The 8700T cpu is a desktop grade in a small shell and watt footprint and also has vpro and hyperthreading.
It’s not a rack server but it’s easy enough to add a Mac Studio/Mini soon enough for crunching.
I have spent too much time with full rack server gear and using it a can seem like a matter of preference before need. It’s heavy, hungry, noisy, and my better half didn’t like when I brought the leftover data centre stuff home.
The USFF boxes are near silent and sip electricity.
Can ram still be upgraded in Mac minis?
The m2 Mac mini is a workhorse. Exciting times.
Probably the main issue you will run in to is funding ARM docker images, usually you have to rebuild them yourself.
It might be feasible to but 2 or 3 usffs to cover one max mini at a fraction of the cost, or stick the mini to doing only certain tasks on 8 or 16gb.
Since the m1 addresses memory differently less ram should go further, but I’m not sure if those efficiencies extend to virtualized machines.
I’ll try to dig up an old spreadsheet and add the the m1’s and m2’s stack up to the above.
The arm docker image is a real deterrent. Forums have more and more workarounds and tweaks so hopefully they’ll become available as time goes on. It’s often not worth fighting with compiling.
In the end I went with HP t630's. They're much less powerful, but they're also much cheaper and very small! Dell Wyse 3040 or 5060's are also fantastic options. I liked the t630 because it has a proper sata SSD slot and will take up to 64GB RAM. The power bricks are also quite small too.
I'm going to use mine as a home lab testing environment for cluster learning. I'm curious what kind of performance I can get by placing 3 kubernetes nodes on each and spreading out the workload across the differnt devices.
As time goes on, for the sake of portability, it seems useful to have one appliance dedicated to the physical house, one for personal/family, and then to the extent of hobby or playing with tech, higher powered servers are useful.
I have been trying to stay with Intel 64 bit to keep things easy but will probably get dragged back towards arm and 32 bit.
Edit: more typos than hn should allow