Service Upgrade
After 10 years the Intel Core i7-7700s have been retired.
Replaced with a single UM790 Ryzen 9 7940HS. Added 96GB of DDR5 SODIMM and 1.5 TB of NVMe storage. The unit runs off a tiny Cyber Power ST425VA UPS, with network supplied by a TP-Link Wifi Ethernet Bridge (RE315) connecting to the Starlink Wifi Network.
Setup was without issue. The units claim max 64GB RAM, but forums revealed they would take the new 128GB SODIMMs, and my 96GB was recognized OOTB.
Proxmox 8.4 install was quick. VMs were backed up from previous VE, and restored to the new system. There were no unpleasant surprises, IJW.
16 vCPUs, and noticeably faster in a tiny footprint that makes a Mac Mini look big. Runs very cool.
Cluster-Builder deployed a new and identical Kubernetes 1.33 in a few minutes, and longhorn made it easy to restore volume backup data from S3 into the new cluster. Everything came up clean just as it was before.
The UPS, Wifi adapter and UM790 all fit on a serving tray, and it can be moved around the house without an outage. Very handy little micro-data center.
The first actual data center I worked in served the largest call center in Canada at the time. Our server was a dual processor Pentium 90. The server took up more space than a refrigerator, consumed more power, and had a whopping 30GB RAID array that was equally massive. It ran SVR4 straight from Bell Labs, which was my first Unix. The data center was housed in the Air Canada building, with massive UPS and backup generator support, fire suppression and other expensive overhead. This served a 1300 seat 7/24 call center.
I think the serving tray reflects the emerging distributed approach to data centers. The appliance. Taking a distributed systems approach to data center implementation, by networking a series of appliances to an orchestrating control plane, is the future of compute, big and small. Every other approach is a legacy minefield. Keep no pets.
This little rural home lab setup dwarfs the capability of that big AT&T data center by orders of magnitude. And it fits on a serving tray.
The entire setup cost approx. $800 CAD, re-using existing NVMe drives.
AWS wants over $600 / month for similar processing power.
At some point someone is going to start asking questions.