Home labs are really starting to pick up some pace with many vendors tailoring products and solutions directly to this market. It’s becoming hard to keep up with what’s coming out. Of those releases, what is actually useful for your home lab?
This is an experimental aggregation post that may or may not continue, depending on feedback.
Compute
– It looks like the new Intel Xeon lineup is getting a fair amount of attention, both AnandTech and ServeTheHome here and here.
– The new Broadwell-DE based systems really are awesome, 128GB of RAM and 10GbE is great in such a small package.
– And if you want 128 GB of DDR4 RAM, Corsair have a bunch of new kits.
Storage
- Will we ever see the SandForce SF3500 based SSDs?
- Not to be confused with Intel’s new SSD now available, the S3510.
- Getting some more NVMe details from Supermicro.
- QNAP have a couple of AMD based NASs on the market here and here.
- Synology have DSM 5.2 out. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of improvement they have made to their (previously poor) SSD caching. Checkout details on SmallNetBuilder and ServeTheHome.
- Speaking of Synology they have some cheap(ish) large NASs that have just been released.
Network
- One thing that continues to amaze me is the price of PCIe 10GbE NICs. You can buy a whole new motherboard with Intel NICs for a LOT less than this new card from D-Link.
- Speaking of those Intel 10GbE NICs, the new one is the X552/X557-AT.
Software
- EMC have some pretty nifty Software Defined Storage solutions that are now opensource / available to the community.
Other
- My friend Frank Denneman and I certainly agree on specs for home lab servers.
- Converging standards is a good thing, but it’ll be interesting to see how the “thunderbolt networking” gets implemented.
- If you hadn’t noticed I’m a big fan of the Intel Xeon D-1540. Supermicro have a great little box that consumes minimal power.
- More traditional small systems (LGA2011-3) still have new options too.
- While not strictly “home lab” one can dream right?