Pollux is the latest addition to my ever-shrinking stable of machines, and is the first of a two stage process to replace my VM server with a trio of small, lightweight machines to handle my production server duties.

Prior to this month, I had Altair, Polaris, and Vega. Altair was my primary file server with massive internal storage, Polaris was dedicated to “services”, and Vega just kinda sat where ever I could find a hole with power and ethernet.

The Old

Vega’s primary purpose in life was to sit and wait for Altair to hail it during its daily cron run; Altair would shove down whatever file changes took place that day. Basically it was my fail safe if something catastrophic ever happened to Altair that its redundant drives and linux-y goodness couldn’t fix on its own. It also gave me a window in which to go in and yank a file that had been saved over or corrupted.

Polaris was the desktop i redid just a month or so before buying my Mac Pro. The previous parts were aging very badly, fans were dying at an alarming rate and I just wasn’t happy with the performance any more, so i dumped some money into it and beefed it out somewhat. Then when I bought the Pro, it got usurped into being my VM server, hosting 9 VMs across its dual core Athlon and 3GB of RAM. My grand vision was to have each service live in a separate VM, and I more or less succeeded. But the whole box was plagued by the timing issues that all AMD machines suffer from when running VMware, and I got sick of having to maintain all 10 machines (1 host + 9 virtual).

The New

I become interested in Intel’s Atom architecture when i first heard about it a long time ago. The concept of a lower power machine to handle my relatively light weight server duties was very appealing. I haven’t been disappointed. According to my Kill-A-Watt, Pollux sips 35W of power, versus the 180 or so Watts the current Polaris draws when idle. It has more storage in a single drive (500GB) than Polaris does across two (160+250), and the 2GB of RAM is almost as much as what 9 machines were sharing before. And the best part: Total cost of the machine was < $170. The barebones Foxconn case/motherboard combo was $95, plus $23 for a 2GB stick of PQI memory and $49 for a Samsung 5400 RPM 500GB hard drive. Ubuntu 9.04 Server was installed using a bootable USB flash drive, and the network install took all of maybe 15 minutes, i didn't time it. The 500GB drive gives me plenty of space to replace Vega's backup duties, which means that box has been deprecated and shut down. The VM on Polaris running BIND (for local DNS) has been migrated to Pollux and shut down, and Apache is running and doing its thing, though it won't be switched over to production until i get my database server moved.

The Future

Pollux is step one in what I hope will only be a two step process. This was the testing phase, to see if it was viable and what kind of performance I can expect. The next stage will be picking up two more of these boxes. One will be almost a complete twin to Pollux (named Castor, Astronomy buffs rejoice, everybody else go here). It will host a MySQL database, as well as Asterisk, and will have a dual core processor. It will still run Ubuntu Server, have 2GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. Polaris will be the third of the trio, and will be another dual core Atom, with 2GB of RAM, and potentially a 1TB drive. It will be running Windows Server 2008 for all those non-Unixy things that sometimes must be done. I’m hoping to have all this done by Christmas.

Final Thoughts

The experience with Polaris was a mostly positive one. I learned a lot just $^#*ing it up and having to fix it, working through the time problems (basically none of the VMs could keep time, they’d end up days or weeks ahead or behind the actual date/time), and getting a feel for the capabilities of VMWare outside of a true production environment where people would expect, well, results and stuff. At home though, it was really quite overkill and unnecessary. Scaling down to two Ubuntu Server instances and a single Windows Server instance will simplify my management tasks a lot, and removing the giant furnace that is Polaris should help me lower the temperatures in here a bit as well. As I type this its roughly 83º in my office..

So this summer when energy started to go through the roof I decided it was time to “green up” a little more and get more energy efficient about things, not to mention lower my electric bill as much as possible. So shortly after classes started this semester I picked up a Kill-A-Watt and did some measurements.

First, some background: My two servers (Altair and Polaris) are both cobble boxes, computers i have built from old or retired parts, at least to date. Polaris was my primary desktop until I got my Mac Pro, Altair was truly a cobble box and was filled with a hodgepodge of hardware that was typically hand-me-downs from any upgrades I did to my desktop. Prior to the introduction of the Pro to my geekosystem, Altair was my primary server, it ran Ubuntu and did everything (web, mysql, tftp, voip, dns, sftp, ssh, smb/nfs/afp, etc). Once I had Polaris, my options opened up some.

Altair Specs (old)

• 2800+ AMD Athlon
• Gigabyte GA7-NNXP Motherboard (is it bad I still remember this without having to look it up?)
• 1.5GB DDR400 Memory
• Whatever Video Card was working at the time
• 4 Port Rosewill SATA Controller
• PATA – 200GB, 320GB, 320GB, 60GB
• SATA – 320GB, 500G
• RX-82U Enclosure -> 750GB, 250G

Polaris Specs (current)

• AMD Athlon X2 3800+
• 3GB RAM (DDR400)
• Foxconn mATX Motherboard
• 160GB SATA system drive
• 250GB SATA storage drive

So I just got my Pro but wasn’t quite ready to take the retired hardware from Polaris and merge it into Altair yet. So what did I do? As any good geek would have, I installed VMWare Server One of my biggest issues with having my single box was that it was incredibly insecure. Anybody who pwned any of the services i was hosting off of it, several of them to the outside world for my remote use, had just hosed my single server. The goal was to end up with this:

Network Diagram – Spring/Summer 2008

I didn’t miss by much. I spent the latter half of the summer slowly migrating services to several VMs (Powered by Ubuntu JeOS) and ended up with a pretty sweet, diversified setup that I won’t detail here since this is supposed to be about Altair, the file server side. With the burden of these services removed from Altair I was able to do the first major overhaul of it that I have done since I first started using it in early 2006. With the intent of minimizing its energy use while maximizing storage, I ended up with these specs:

Altair Specs (new)

• Intel Celeron 430 (1.8Ghz, 35W Power consumption)
• Intel DG45ID Motherboard
• 2GB DDR2 800 (single stick)
• 2x100GB 7200RPM Seagate 2.5″ Primary Drives (Software RAID 1)
• 2x750GB Samsung Storage Drives
• 1x500GB Seagate Storage Drive
• 1x320GB Seagate Storage Drive
• Ubuntu 8.10 Server Beta (needed the new kernel support for the new hardware)

Some notes about the install, while researching what to do for a reliable, fault-tolerant drive setup for my primary data, about 30GB and growing of stuff that I would prefer not to lose, ever, I stumbled across this (Syba’s 2.5″ Mobile Drive Rack (CL-HD-MRDU25S)):

at Newegg. Populated with a pair of 100GB 2.5″ drives run in RAID 1 (mirroring), it left valuable 3.5″ slots open for larger capacity drives that I can’t afford to run mirrored, and gives me 100GB of reliable storage to use for my boot disk and precious data. I also get a read boost from them because of the RAID1, which is always nice. Of course all of this lives in my Lian-Li case, which is a twin to the case Polaris lives in (I liked it so much I bought a 2nd one when they were on sale again), which acts like a giant heatsink and keeps everything frigid.

Back to the power usage. First, a benchmark for comparison: my Mac Pro and its 4 monitor setup (1×20″, 2×17″, 1×15″) draws roughly 400W of power while i’m using it. That includes M-Audio AV30 speakers, a Cisco 7960, Netgear GS108 Gigabit Switch, USB and Firewire hubs, mouse charger(s), a 1200VA UPS, you get the picture. I forget what the exact kWh used per day was but it wasn’t nearly as bad as one would think. I think by my calculations (rough at best) it costs me about $12USD / month to power my workstation 24/7/365. Polaris and Altair running headless were peaking around 410W of power usage, not terrible but not respectable by any stretch since the Mac Pro would smoke both of them put together in any benchmark.

While Altair was down I took the liberty to check the draw on Polaris and it was hovering at 140-180W of usage, so Altair was sucking down the lions share of the power, my guess would be all those old, inefficient PATA disks. Right now fully operational with its new upgrades, Altair is drawing about 95W. I cut the power usage of that box by at least half, approaching one-third. The impact on my electricity bill each month isn’t going to be a shocking as I would like it to be, but wow. All that money I’ve been throwing away for so long on powering something so inefficient.

Right now I’m down slightly on storage, as the drives I removed aren’t quite covered by the single 750GB drive that went in their place, but I have enough headroom to account the immediate future and with the price of storage continually falling its only a matter of time before another deal on 750GB or 1TB drives tempts me enough for me to add some capacity.

Long story short, here are some pictures, try not to make fun of my “rack” too much, it works, it keeps thing cool, though I’m having to keep an eye on the temperatures in the garage, it is starting to get kinda chilly outside and I want to make sure things don’t get cold enough to start having problems with condensation…

Servers – Front View

Servers – Rear View

Altair – Side Panel & Filter

Altair – Inside Shot

Altair – The Power Supply

Altair – Syba 2.5″ Drive Bay Adapter

Altair – The Main Drives