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
I really wanted to do something like this about a year ago but ran into the great Pi shortage and ultimately gave up after all I could find cheap enough were 3b’s.
Also I mainly use my server for storage and I don’t think the Pi’s USB3 is really adequate.
The Pi shortage was definitely a nightmare. I wouldn’t have bothered with this even at the start of the year as you just couldn’t find the kit. It does seem to have eased now, though. Digi-Key and Farnell have had good stock levels of CM4s for the last couple of months and the CM5 can’t be far away now. I’ve found performance of CM4s with NVMe SSD’s are pretty good, certainly enough for my use cases. Blades like this aren’t much use for storage servers though, not really enough storage options. I wouldn’t rule out doing a purpose built storage server at some point though, my home network has a couple of big NAS boxes with 20-odd SSDs and I’d love to replace those!