Category Archives: Tidbit

Home Lab Tidbits #3

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

Xeon
– 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?

Home Lab Tidbits #2

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 ServeTheHome has their hands on one of the new Xeon D SoC motherboards from Supermicro and loaded up ESXi 6.
  • Intel have released some pretty cheap Celeron SoC, which might be useful for those with heat / power constraints (4W-6W).
  • Benchmarks for the Xeon D-1540 are starting to emerge, and it’s looking pretty good for the price.

Storage

  • The storage wars are heating up again with western digital and toshiba talking about 10TB SSDs.
  • With huge capacity SSDs, we’ll also need faster small ones, like this new SSD 750 PCIe SSD from Intel
  • Buffalo have launched a new NAS series based on the Atom, but this NAS from Thecus wins the cool vote with a built in UPS.
  • By far the cheapest NASs I’ve seen are cropping up. Last HLT was the Synology DS115j. Now Qnap have the TS-112P for the ~$100 price point.
  • Samsung have released their popular EVO 850 line in the mSATA form factor.
  • OCZ are back now that Toshiba are controlling them with the Vector 180.

Network

  • No news this time.

Software

  • Can’t afford to build your own lab? You could always run up a nested environment on vCloud Air for ~$15 a month. Or there’s always AutoLab on your laptop :)

Other

  • While there’s plenty of racks available, the startech 42u is certainly easier to move than most.

Home Lab Tidbits #1

Home labs are really starting to pick up some pace with many vendors tailoring products and solutions directly to this emerging 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

  • ASRock have a new motherboard, the EPC612D8A-TB this may well rival the Home Lab favorites from SuperMicro.
  • Intel have announced their SoC for Enterprise, the Xeon D. Lets hope some inexpensive Home Lab components are the result.
  • Wanting to build a new system to host lots and lots of storage? The Haswell-E based ASRock X99 has 18 on-board SATA ports.

Storage

  • In the market for a new NAS? SmallNetBuilder has a guide that will help you decide which is best for you.
  • Both Asustor and Western Digital have a couple of new NAS units with decent performance.
  • ServeTheHome benchmarked the inexpensive 240GB Intel DC S3500 SSD and the considerably more expensive 1.6TB Toshiba PX03SNB160.
  • If you want some SLC enterprise class storage, Hitachi have a 100GB SSD that has great read and write sequential performance.
  • Synology keeps their entry bar low with the DS115j.

Network

  • Netgear have a competitor in the cheap 10GbE switch segment. ZyXel have a new 12-port 10GbE switch, the XS1920-12.

Software

  • NAS4Free is pretty easy to get up and running in 5 minutes if you want roll your own shared storage.
  • A little product called vSphere 6 went GA this week.