Hi,
I thought I’d post my latest project. I use a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute modules as servers and decided to build myself a custom blade server to host them. This is replacing a bunch of old Intel rack mount servers on my home network - it’s a lot less power hungry! It’s been through a few iterations and is now working really well. This is the server:
It’s a 2U rack mountable unit, in an off-the-shelf ABS case with some custom 3D printed parts. The server takes up to 10 of these blades:
It’s got gigabit Ethernet, USB-A and HDMI on the front and an NVMe SSD slot on the board, along with an SD card slot and a battery backed real time clock. There’s a little OLED on the front displaying information about the blade, including the name and IP address to make it easy to identify for maintenance. There’s also an RP2040 on it for management.
The blades plug in to a custom backplane which provides power and centralised management. There’s an LCD front panel providing basic tools for powering on and off blades and status information, and another compute module which acts as a management web server. It can be used to upload flash images to the blades via the backplane, and provides serial console access to the blades through the web interface.
I’ve been using this for a while now and was wondering if other folks out there are interested in it? It would be quite quick and easy for me to turn this into a product for sale if there was a market out there for it.
Please let me know any comments or suggestions you have, any feedback is appreciated!
Alastair
What is the benefit of using raspberries for your use case. Low power usually comes with low performance. Or am I missing something? If I invest the same amount of money in different miniPCs (used on ebay or similar) wouldn’t I get more compute power for the money?
Probably a k3s cluster. The bigger constraint will be memory.
Yeah, this isn’t useful for many things, but as others have mentioned there are situations where it is. My original use case, the thing which prompted me to build this (other than just the fun of seeing if I could do it!) was to replace a whole load of low complexity VMs. I’m a freelance programmer and I do a bunch of hosting for both myself and some clients out of my home office. I’ve got a small rack setup in my attic with UPS, and have redundant fibre connections. It’s obvs nowhere near datacentre quality but it works well for my purposes.
I’d previously been using VMs running on some second hand enterprise x64 kit that I bought. Whilst this works great, the electricity bill is rather higher than I’d like! When I analysed what all the VMs are doing I realised that it’d be perfectly possible to do this on a Pi. In the dim and distant past I was a network infrastructure guy, so I started looking into “proper” server Pi solutions and before I knew it I was down this rabbit hole!
It works really well for low power server applications. It’s not in the same league as the big iron ARM mega-core servers (or indeed Xeon servers) for performance, but then it’s nowhere near that league for price either. I haven’t figured out an exact price if I was to sell it commercially, but it’d likely be in the $800 US price range without CMs. If you were to max that with 4GB PIs that’d end up around $1500, which’d give you 40 cores of pretty decent performance and 80GB of RAM. The Gigabyte and Altera servers I’ve seen are awesome and way more powerful than this but are several times more expensive.
Indeed. But for 1500 USD I can build a brand new small form factor pc with 96gb ram and lots of compute power. Well if it works for you, great. Certainly looks cool