alt Hacker NewsA half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.
Data protection is an issue, but maybe this is something that SGX and family can provide eventually.
A scheme like this makes a lot of sense for distributed redundant backups.
The real problem is bandwidth. Most home users still don’t have decent symmetrical bandwidth. If you could solve this, then home servers could provide a handful of edge services to others in the area. I’m not sure where this makes sense versus local colo though.
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> A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.
I have home servers, designed for home and they are not too bad, and I can turn them off when sleeping for example.. It's very different with a 20U server running and spinning non stop. Not many people will have the soundproofing to simply not hear it at night.
I don't know, I wouldn't see it working, but I'm just one.
A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw.
A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...)
And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.
I've had a half rack in my home for many years -- if it's half empty, half powered off, and half full of low powered stuff, then it's not going to consumer a lot of power. (e.g. 'only' a few hundred watts) But 20u of 1u virtualization servers filled up -- or a single Nvidia DGX -- would easily overwhelm a normal home electrical system. The kind of workloads in datacenters are not people homelabbing for fun, but people running production workloads.