Sunday October 25, 2009

A Small and Energy-Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server

In an earlier entry, I outlined my most important requirements for an optimal OpenSolaris Home Server. It should:

1. Run OpenSolaris in order to fully leverage ZFS,
2. Support ECC memory, so data is protected at all times,
3. Be power-efficient, to help the environment and control costs,
4. Use a moderate amount of space and be quiet, for some extra WAF points.

So I went shopping and did some research on possible components. Here's what I came up with:

Choosing a Platform: AMD or Intel?

Disclosure: My wife works for AMD, so I may be slightly biased. But I think the following points are still very valid.

Intel is currently going through a significant change in architecture: The older Core 2 microarchitecture was based on the Front Side Bus (FSB), where the CPU connects to the Northbridge which contains the memory controller and connects to the memory, while also connecting to the Southbridge which connects to I/O.

Now, they are switching to the new Nehalem microarchitecture which has a memory-controller built into the CPU and a scalable I/O bus called Quickpath Interconnect that connects CPUs with other CPUs and/or IO.

Unfortunately, none of these architectures seem to support ECC memory at consumer level pricing. The cheapest Intel-based ECC-motherboard I could find had still more than double the cost of an AMD-based one. Even though the new Intel Core i7 series is based on Nehalem and thus could support ECC memory easily in theory, Intel somehow chose to not expose this feature. In addition, Core i7 CPUs are relatively new and there are not yet any power efficient versions available.

The Intel Atom processor series may be interesting for a home server from a pure power-saving perspective, but again, Atom motherboards don't support ECC and once your workload becomes a little more demanding (like transcoding or some heavier compiling), you'll miss the performance of a more powerful CPU.

AMD on the other hand has a number of attractive points for the home server builder:

• AMD consumer CPUs use the same microarchitecture than their professional CPUs (currently, it's the K10 design). They only vary by number of cores, cache size, number of HT channels, TDP and frequency, which are all results of the manufacturing process. All other microarchitecture features are the same. When using an AMD consumer CPU, you essentially get a "smaller brother" of their high end CPUs.
• This means you'll also get a built-in memory-controller that supports ECC.
• This also means less chips to build a system (no Northbridge needed) and thus lower power-consumption.
• AMD has been using the HyperTransport Interconnect for quite a while now. This is a fast, scaleable interconnect technology that has been on the market for quite a while so chipsets are widely available, proven and low-cost.

So it was no suprise that even low-cost AMD motherboards at EUR 60 or below are perfectly capable of supporting ECC memory which gives you an important server feature at economic cost.

My platform conclusion: Due to ECC support, low power consumption and good HyperTransport performance at low cost, AMD is an excellent platform for building a home server.

AMD Athlon II X2 240e: A Great Home Server CPU

While I was shopping around for AMD Athlon CPUs and just before I was about to decide for an AMD Athlon II X2 variant, AMD offered me one of their brand new AMD Athlon II X2 240e for testing, provided that I blogged about it. Thank you, AMD!

Introduced in October 20th, this CPU is part of the newest energy-efficient range of consumer CPUs from AMD. It has 2 cores (hence X2), snazzy 2.8 GHz and a 2 MB L2 cache. What's most important: The TDP for this CPU is only 45W, meaning that even under the highest stress, this CPU will never exceed 45W of power consumption. Including the memory controller. As you've guessed already, the "e" in the model number stands for "efficient".

There's an important trade-off to consider for home server CPUs: For instance, the AMD Phenom II series would have been more powerful because it has an additional L3 cache, but their TDP is at 65W minimum. While big caches (both with AMD and Intel) are good for compute-intensive operations and games, they can't help much in a home server context: Home servers spend most of their non-idle time transferring data from A to B (files, videos, music) and a cache doesn't help much here, cause it's just another stop between I/O and CPU to pass by. Transferred data hardly gets re-used.

Instead, for home servers, sacrificing the L3 cache for lower power consumption makes a lot of sense: You pay less for the CPU and you pay less for your power bill without sacrificing too much (if any) server relevant performance.

My CPU conclusion: For home servers, AMD Athlon II "e" series are perfect, because they save power and money and do the job very well. For games you might choose a more powerful Phenom II processor, which delivers better compute power at a slightly higher power bill.

Finding the Right Motherboard

After nailing the Platform and CPU question, I needed a motherboard. This can be a confusing process: For each CPU there are different chipsets, then there are different vendors offering motherboards based on these chipset, and then they offer different variants with different features. What should a good home server motherboard offer?

• OpenSolaris support: Most motherboards "just work" with OpenSolaris, especially if they've been available for some time and/or use some well-known chipsets. To remove any doubts, consult the OpenSolaris Hardware Compatibility List.
• ECC: Yes, AMD's ECC support is in the CPU, but just in case, we want to make sure that the motherboard exposes this feature to the user.
• Integrated graphics: We only need a graphics card for installation, BIOS-settings/updates or debugging. The graphics shouldn't consume much power and doesn't need to deliver a lot of performance. Therefore, integrated graphics is just fine for a home server, and it saves some precious slot space, too.
• Enough SATA ports: You need two ports for a mirrored root pool, another two for a mirrored data pool and then some more for hot-spare or if you want to spread your data pool across 4 or more disks. Many motherboards come with 6 SATA ports, which is ok.
• Stability: If you have the choice between different variants, try to go for the "business" or "quality" version. It will likely have slightly better components and be better tuned towards 24/7 operation than the "performance", "gaming" or "overclocker" type boards which try to squeeze out more performance at the expense of durability.

Here's a very useful email thread on the OpenSolaris ZFS-discuss mailing list about CPU and motherboard options, pros and cons and user experiences. In this discussion, F.Wessels recommended the M3A78 series from Asus so I went for the M3A78-CM motherboard, which is their "business class" variant, priced at around 60 Euros and it has 6 SATA and 12(!) USB ports.

My motherboard conclusion: The Asus M3A78-CM motherboard has everything I need for a home server at a very low cost, and it's proven to run OpenSolaris just fine.

The Case: Antec NSK-1380

I won't go into much details about the case. My goal was to find one that can support at least 4 disks while being as compact as possible. The Antec NSK-1380 was the smallest case I could find that supports 4 disks. It comes with a built-in power supply, an extra fan, some features to help with keeping noise down and it looked ok for a PC case.

Miscellaneous Tips&Tricks

While putting everything together, I ran into some smaller issues here and there. Here's what I came up with to solve them:

• CPU cooler: My CPU being a gift from AMD, it came without a cooler. I chose the Zalman CNPS 7000C AL-CU because it was the cheapest cooler that was less than 6cm high, which is a limit imposed by the case. Unfortunately, it collides with one of the 4 harddisk slots by a mere couple of millimeters, so I need to figure out how to best cut or bend the blades to make room for the disk without hurting the cooler too much. I'm not very familiar with PC CPU coolers, but I suspect that with 45W TDP one could even get away with a passive cooler. The Zalman came with a throttle circuit which I set to the minimum speed. This seems to be more than enough and it makes the system really silent, but I need some more thorough testing to confirm. Drop me a comment if you are familiar with passive cooling of 45W TDP CPUs.
• Boot disks: We need something to boot our home server from, so boot disks are unavoidable. I say "disks", because they should always be mirrored. But other than providing a way of booting, they tend to get in the way, especially when space is a precious resource in a small case. Some people therefore boot from CF cards or other small flash media. This can be a nice solution, especially combined with an IDE-to-CF adapter, but consumer level flash media is either very slow (a typical OS install can take many hours!) or very expensive. While looking for alternatives, I found a nice solution: The Scythe Slot Rafter fits into an unused PCI slot (taking up the breadth of two) and provides space for mounting four 2.5" disks at just EUR 5. These disks are cheap, good enough and I had an unused one lying around anyway, so that was a perfect solution for me.
• Extra NIC: The Asus M3A78-CM comes with a Realtek NIC and some people complained about driver issues with OpenSolaris. So I followed the advice on the aforementioned Email thread and bought an Intel NIC which is well supported, just in case.
• USB boot: I couldn't get the M3A78-CM to boot from USB at all. I tried a USB stick and a USB disk and different boot settings in the BIOS to no avail. I gave up and built in a DVD-ROM drive from my old server just to install OpenSolaris, then built it out again. Jan Brosowski has the same motherboard and he found out that you need to update to the latest BIOS revision and use the USB port that's right below the Ethernet port for USB boot to work. YMMV :).

The Result

And now for the most important part: How much power does the system consume? I did some testing with one boot disk and 4GB of ECC RAM and measured about 45W idle. While stressing CPU cores, RAM and the disk with multiple instances of sysbench, I could not get the system to consume more than 80W. All in all, I'm very pleased with the numbers, which are about half of what my old system used to consume. I didn't do any detailed performance tests yet, but I can say that the system feels very responsive and compile runs just rush along the screen. CPU temperature won't go beyond the low 50Cs on a hot day, despite using the lowest fan speed, so cooling seems to work well, too.

I just started full 24/7 operation of my new home server this weekend, so I hope I'll have some more long-term experience about performance and stability in a few months. Meanwhile, I'm in the middle of configuring the system, installing some services and implementing a new way of managing my home server. But that's probably the topic of another blog post...

Do you agree with the home server conclusions I reached in this post? Or would you suggest alternatives? Do you have experiences to share with the mentioned components? Or do you have suggestions and tips on how to get the most out of them? Let me know by posting a comment here!

Many thanks go to Michael Schmid of AMD for sending me the AMD Athlon II X2 240e CPU.

"A Small and Energy-Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-10-25 15:22:05.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
amd athlon build home opensolaris server x2 zfs
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Saturday September 19, 2009

New OpenSolaris ZFS Home Server: Requirements

A few months ago, I decided it was time for a new home server. The old one (see picture) is now more than 3 years old (the hardware is 2 years older), so it was time to plan ahead for the inevitable hardware failure. Curiously enough, my old server started to refuse working with some of my external USB disks only a few weeks ago, which confirmed my need for a new system. This is the beginning of a series of blog articles around building a new OpenSolaris home server.

Home Server Goals

Let's go over some goals for a home server to help us decide on the hardware. IMHO, a good home server should:

1. Run OpenSolaris. This means I don't want an appliance because this is too limiting and I'd end up hacking it to make it run something it doesn't do by itself anyway. It should therfore use a real OS.
   It also means I don't want to use Linux, because quite frankly the whole Linux landscape is too unstable, confused and de-focused (don't get me wrong: It's nice for experimentation and as a hobbyist-OS, but I want something more serious to guard my data).
   Windows is out of the question because it delivers too little for too high a price.
   I like BSD (and used to run NetBSD on my Amiga 4000 back then in the mid nineties), but it seems to be more oriented to some (albeit interesting) niches for my taste.
   Right now I prefer OpenSolaris because it's rock-solid, clean, well-documented, well-designed and it has lots of advanced features that other OSes only dream of. Yes, I'd still write and do the same if I weren't a Sun employee.
2. Leverage ZFS. This should be a no-brainer, but I just wanted to point out that any system that is serious about its data should absolutely run ZFS because of the end-to-end-integrity. Period. And then there are many useful features such as compression, send/receive, snapshots, ease of administration, no fscks and much more. Oh, and I'm looking forward to leveraging encryption and de-duplication at home in the near future, too!
3. Use ECC Memory: What's the use of having end-to-end data integrity with ZFS if your data is corrupted before ZFS can create it's checksum? That's why you need ECC Memory. Simply put: Use ECC memory and kiss those unexpected, unexplicable system crashes and broken data surprises good bye.
4. Be Power Efficient: Think 1.5 Euros of electricity bill per Watt per Year for a system running 24/7. The difference between your typical gaming PC and a power-efficient home server can easily be 50W or more when idle, so you're looking at an extra 75 Euros and more of free cash if you just pick your components more carefully. Notice that I'm not saying "Low-Power". There are a lot of compromises when trying to reach absolute low-powerness. Like many optimization problems, squeezing the last few Watts out of your system means investing a lot of money and effort while sacrificing important features. So I want this system to be power-efficient, but without too many sacrifices.
5. Use a Moderate Amount of Space: While my home server sits in the basement, form doesn't matter. But I may move into a new apartment where networking to the basement is not an option. Then the server needs to be living-room capable and have a decent WAF. Which also brings us to:
6. Be quiet: A power-efficient server needs less cooling which helps with being quiet. Again, we don't want to stretch the limits of quietness at all costs, but we want to make sure we don't do any obvious mistakes here that sacrifice the living-room capabilities of the system

What's Next

In the next blog entry, we'll discuss a few processor and platform considerations and reveal a cool, yet powerful option that presented itself to me. Meanwhile, feel free to check out other home server resources, such as Simon Breden's blog, Matthias Pfuetzner's blog, Jan Brosowski's Blog (German) or one of the many home server discussions on the zfs-discuss mailing list.

What are your requirements for a good home server? What do you currently use at home to fulfill your home server needs? What would you add to the above list of home server requirements? Feel free to add a comment below!

"New OpenSolaris ZFS Home Server: Requirements" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-09-19 08:24:29.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
home opensolaris server solaris zfs
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Comments [6]

Friday February 27, 2009

Munich OpenSolaris User Group Install Fest

Yesterday we had the first Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG) install fest at Munich Technical University's Mathematics and Computer Science Building in the Garching Campus. Many thanks go to Martin Uhl for organizing coffee, meeting room and overall help!

The building is very cool, featuring two giant parabolic slides that go all the way from 3rd floor to the ground floor. Check out some construction pictures here.

We began the meeting with a short presentation on OpenSolaris as a home server (here are the slides, let me know if you want the source). It covers some thoughts on why you need a home server (hints: Photos, multimedia clients, backups, first-hand Solaris experience), where to get some extra software, first steps in ZFS, CIFS server and iSCSI and some useful blogs to follow up with for more good home-server specific content.

Most of the people had OpenSolaris installed already, either on their laptops or inside VirtualBox. So most of the conversation was centered around tips for setting up home server hardware, how to install the VirtualBox guest additions and why, or what the best ways are to integrate VirtualBox networking and exchange files between host and guest.

I learned that sharing the host interface with the Virtual Box guest has become as painless as using NAT with the added benefit of making your guest be a first-class citizen on your network, so that's what I'll try out next. Also, the cost of 32 GB USB sticks has come way down at acceptable speed rates, so I'll try one of them to host my OpenSolaris work environment and free my local harddisk a bit.

All in all, such geek gatherings are always a nice excuse to sit together and chat about the newest in technology, find new ideas and have a beer or two afterwards, so how about organizing your own OpenSolaris Installfest in your neighbourhood now?

Update: The way how to set up CIFS in OpenSolaris turned out to be slightly more complicated. Please check the above slides for an updated list of commands on how to set this up. I forgot to include how to expand /etc/pam.conf and assumed this was automatic. Sorry, must be because I set this up at home a while ago...

"Munich OpenSolaris User Group Install Fest" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-02-27 01:50:08.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community fest home install mucosug opensolaris server solaris
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Friday August 22, 2008

POFACS Podcast: Home Servers are quickly becoming Commonplace

I remember having talked at a conference 3 years ago and predicting that home servers are going to become a central part of most people's homes. Today, this would not be a surprise, but back then, running a server at home was really only for computer geeks.

Now, the entertainment industry gives us many home server alternatives to choose from: Add 50-100 EUR to a USB disk's price, and you'll get a built in server that offers the space to your local network through SMB, NFS or other protocols. Microsoft has discovered this, too and they're busily debugging their Windows Home Server products. UPnP has emerged as a standard for driving audio/video components over the network from servers, be they beefed up USB disks or some machine running some OS with some server component or a real dedicated home server machine. If you use iTunes and enable the "sharing" piece, you're already running a home server.

Of course, this is all driven by clients. First, people imported their music from CDs into their computers so they could listen on the go and fill their MP3 players. Then, they discovered that running a PC or even a laptop in your living room to listen to your music isn't really cool and lacks that WAF that makes or breaks most living room decisions. Soon, specialized living room clients started to pop up, such as the Roku Soundbridge or the Logitech SqueezeBox. Digital TV set-top-boxes and PVRs like the DreamBox were also early adopters of the home network by either offering TV streams on the network or using network attached storage for storing recorded TV shows. And the current generation of game consoles comes with Wifi and/or wired networking as a central part of their strategy, and they make good network media players as well. Even the traditional vendors of home entertainment equipment such as TVs, Hifi systems etc. have started to adopt some way of accepting digital audio and/or video from the network for A/V Receivers, DVD-Players, TVs etc. My current favourite, for example is the Linn Sneaky Music DS. And I applaud them for boldy migrating their records business to the digital world, in full studio master quality. You can even buy their full music catalog pre-installed on a 2TB NAS storage appliance, including UPnP server!

The current edition of the POFACS Podcast (sorry, it's in German) talks about the various ways a home server can add value to your living room experience, from serving files to your family's laptops, being a backup repository to the more interesting topics of serving music for dinner in a WAF-friendly way or handling your TV recordings over the net so you don't have to worry about noisy PCs and harddisks sitting in your living room. Enjoy!

"POFACS Podcast: Home Servers are quickly becoming Commonplace" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-08-22 04:14:36.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
home it podcast podcasting pofacs server solaris
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Thursday September 20, 2007

Robot Surgery 101

Today, Roomba was ill. Roomba is our vacuuming robot.

How come we have one? Well, during CeBIT 2006 I met Roger Meike. He works at SunLabs and was presenting one of my favourite projects: Sun SPOT. Anyway, we talked a bit about robots and if they really can be useful or just expensive toys. He recommended Roomba to me and said it would really work.

So I checked out the iRobot home page. Gosh! Their main business is building robots for military purposes! You know, just like in the movies with robot arms and belt-drive, searching for bombs, that kind of thing. So if there is a company capable of building a real working vacuum bot, then it must be these guys. Millions of dollars of robot research hovering around my home for just a few hundred bucks.

It actually works well and Roomba has been vacuuming our home for quite a while now. The deal is this: You save time because you don't have to vacuum your home, Roomba does it while you're away working or at the supermarket. It may be slower, but it doesn't steal you time, so it really acts as a time-saver. If you save, say 15 minutes of time per week by not vacuuming and value your free time at, say 10-20 dollars per hour, then you have more than paid off the cost of a Roomba after a year or two. And you can have a lot of geek fun too!

Anyway, today Roomba decided to not work correctly anymore, it would spin around in circles and never go straight. After checking iRobot's support area and some forums, it seemed to be the bumper sensor. But thorough cleaning of the robot and more or less gentle banging on its bumper wouldn't improve Roomba's behaviour much. More drastic measures were needed.

Thanks to some diagnostic instructions I found on the web, it became clear that the right bumper sensor was really kinda stuck. Fortunately, I found some well-documented disassembly instructions and was able to remove the bumper assembly to check out the sensors. Roomba uses a lot of optical sensors, even for the mechanical stuff (based on rods interrupting light flow etc.) which make them very robust, but sometimes sensitive to dust cluttering. Now that the sensors have all been cleared, our Roomba is back and can continue to happily vacuum our home again!

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This entry was created on 2007-09-20 14:33:36.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
diy geek home howto irobot robots roomba
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