[OFB Cafe] Mini ITX Boards... ATOM CPU

[Fred Smith]

This isn't quite along the same lines of a low power appliance PC, but
it's neat as well. At my company we've been building micro-ITX based
small form factor servers based on this board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182158.  We
pop in a pair of 4 core Xeons and 20 GB of RAM (the board will hold up
to 48 GB), 4x 120GB OCZ SSDs
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227361) and
3 1.5 TB Seagate Barracudas. The system costs $3700, and out performs
$60K database servers built less than a year ago. Oh, and the whole
thing fits in a backpack and is roughly the size of two shoeboxes.

Our professional services group used to go to customer sites with said
$60K database server in a half height rack that weighed about 300 lbs
and required 3 days to ship out.  Now they bring the mini servers in a
carry-on bag and just fly to where ever they were going.

The key is really the solid state drives.  For a database system, you
usually want to spread your database out over lots of 15K spindles so
that you can get random database reads down to around 2 ms, which is
the average seek time of a 15K disk. On our $60K system, we'd get 4
disk shelves full of 14 15K SCSI drives and spread the database out
over all those disks, which were split into a handful of RAID 10
arrays for reliability. The SSDs from OCZ, Mtron/Imation, or Intel all
have a <1ms seek time, because there's no moving parts, so 4 of them
in a RAID 0 outperform 56 15K SCSI disks in RAID 10.

And, they're useful (if not a little expensive) on the other end of
the spectrum.  If you're building an appliance PC, pick up a couple
120 GB SSDs for your storage.  No moving parts, very little heat
generated, and they run on half the power of a 5400 RPM drive.

-Fred

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:19 PM, Donald R Spoon <drspoon at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Tim,
>
> I just ran across this review of 5 different ATOM CPU powered boards at the
> Mini-ITX web site.
> http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/atoms/
>
> It might be useful in your decision in case you haven't seen it yet.  I
> didn't read it all, but in the video playback section it mentions using
> Ubuntu for a quickie comparison test and it did quite well!
>
> -Don Spoon-
>
>
> -
>
> _______________________________________________
> OfB Cafe - Cafe at ofb.biz
> Brought to you by your friends at Open for Business.
> http://ofb.biz/mailman/listinfo/cafe_ofb.biz
>
> DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this mailinglist are the personal
> opinions of the author and do not represent those of Open for Business.
>