Low power server solutions

[Chewy509]

Was just browsing the SuperMicro website and stumbled upon these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm

Low power Atom based servers and mainboards! The interesting thing to note (besides the avg 3x price of any other Atom based mainboard - around US$220 ea.) are PCIex16 slot (x4 electrical), Dual Intel LAN adapters (most other Atom boards I've seen only have a single Realtek 8111 LAN), and IPMI 2.0. (supports virtual media and KVM over LAN).

Would make fine entry-level fileservers, low-end routers, DNS/DHCP servers, webserver, etc. Wouldn't attempt to run anything like Exchange, SBS, Oracle DB, SQL Server on it though.

PS. IPMI = http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/IPMI.cfm

 

[ddrueding]

Those are interesting. This is the one that has me thinking.

 

[Mercutio]

The router/access point for my apartment is built on a high-end ARM CPU, 512MB RAM, some Mini-PCI slots, a 2GB Compact Flash card and Linux. It does all those low-power server tasks pretty well. I suspect it would be acceptable for mail duties for a small number of users as well.

I spent more than $220 on it though.

 

[Chewy509]

I spent more than $220 on it though.

$220 is for just the mainboard, still need to buy chassis, PSU, RAM, HDD, etc...

A complete chassis + mainboard is $360 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101332 ), still need to add RAM and HDD.

 

[MaxBurn]

I built my home server on the X7SPA-HF and I quite like the board. The IPMI with virtual KVM really sold it and works pretty well. Seems more than fast enough for what it is doing too, the dual core atom feels pretty nice.