alt Hacker NewsRandom thought: Why don’t we have a server rack that runs at home but is managed by a company, then people or businesses rent them? Th important use case is that the heat generated can be used for home. Like property managers, business maintaining them are heat managers for home.
Replies
I feel like this idea would work better at a somewhat larger scale, like a small to medium datacenter heating an apartment or office building. The downside is for any of these systems is that when it's too hot outside that heat becomes a liability so you'd have to have the infrastructure to divert heat as well. The other downside is that you'd be replacing a very well understood technology with minimal maintenance requirements with a relatively complex technology with more extensive and complex maintenance requirements.
- Power fail-over (battery + generator backup) in every house?
- Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks
- Probably don't want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices
- Massive theft risk
- Homeowner's insurance would probably be irked
I had a similar random thought: Why don't we have a cloud company that does something opposite to what a Cloud company usually does. Instead of renting out resources from a data center, they help company setting up local resources and sell/rent out the unused capacity to other companies/individuals?
Probably a bit of a nightmare to oversight all the resources and ensure consistency and privacy but hey why can't we dream?
Yeah exactly, I was thinking this would be a good solution for crypto mining rigs. AI is similar from a power requirement perspective.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rpy7envr5o
Data centre in the shed reduces energy bills to £40
Residential connectivity sucks.
If you put a rack in a datacenter, and it's a decent datacenter, you'll probably have at least 2x10G connectivity off the rack; if you need more, you can get more. If you put it at someone's home, good luck.
Hard "no" to subscriptions and "cloud management" for shit. On-prem ownership or bust.
The value doesn't line up for anyone. From my perspective as a homeowner, gas heating is cheap, and replacing my gas furnace with someone else's server rack is of significantly more negative value than my current cost of heating.