Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Okay, ordered a crappy 12V 6A adapter on Amazon because I want to test the motherboard first to make sure it runs Linux OK, and ordered the ASRock Q1900B-ITX from Newegg. As stuff gets here we will try it

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

i taught i`ll never use this picture ever

it was in 2008 .
it was a big kick ass truck that ship the parts and it took me almost 8 weeks to install them.
pff i could talk all day how many problems i had to install them.

but the biggest problem was HEAT
after 2 days i took that pic i started one blade from each chassi to self test.

on the first day with those 4 blades ON we got a call at 3 am that those blades will burn the room.
We where like ... What the !$!@$!

The air cooling was standard and it did not manage to cool those blades.
what will have happen if i started all to do self test?
after 2 weeks they change it with a MALL Chiller and i had to put a jacket to go again in that room

I will rather buy space from a big firm to use server then to make mine .
My point of view

in 2008 servers had a lot worse performance per watt.
Besides, each server here was 10W TDP. Not two 100W CPUs, FB DIMM DDR2 RAM, and 15K hard drives.

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

I don't think it uses that much power. Maybe at spin up, but not all hard drives would spin up at once. Laptop drives would certainly use less power, but are slower and more expensive per capacity. I have attached a picture of my power supplies, as well as one of my dog - she loves whip cream!

[dj_ricoh]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

i taught i`ll never use this picture ever

it was in 2008 .
it was a big kick ass truck that ship the parts and it took me almost 8 weeks to install them.
pff i could talk all day how many problems i had to install them.

but the biggest problem was HEAT
after 2 days i took that pic i started one blade from each chassi to self test.

on the first day with those 4 blades ON we got a call at 3 am that those blades will burn the room.
We where like ... What the !$!@$!

The air cooling was standard and it did not manage to cool those blades.
what will have happen if i started all to do self test?
after 2 weeks they change it with a MALL Chiller and i had to put a jacket to go again in that room

I will rather buy space from a big firm to use server then to make mine .
My point of view

[goontron]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

60 Watts!! Surely it will not use that much! I was thinking 1-2A... ? Even if I use a desktop hard drive. The J1900 CPU has a 10W TDP, there are no fans.

a desktop drive uses nearly an amp!

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

60 Watts!! Surely it will not use that much! I was thinking 1-2A... ? Even if I use a desktop hard drive. The J1900 CPU has a 10W TDP, there are no fans.

[mariushm]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

The connector for picoatx is most likely 2.5x5.5mm.

You'll have to be careful with those ebay connectors, they're generally rated for only a few amps, if your server uses 50-60 watts the connector may overheat or have too high resistance.
Also, buying those 50 connectors is basically a false economy.. you still need cable for those... a 30m spool of AWG18 cable is about 20$, or about $90 for 150 meters spool.. even if you use 2 x 1 meter wires, that still adds about 1$ to the price, making each connector+cable pair about 1.3-1.5$

You can buy connector with 6' (1.8m) awg24 cable for 1.7$ (50pcs) and it's molded, good connection etc etc .. awg24 is perfectly safe for up to 3-3.5a (about 35-50w): http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...2184-ND/568575

AWG18 assemblies are a bit more expensive at about 2.5$ each but those do about 6-8A without problems (well, as long as the resistance of the barrel connector itself isn't too high.

But I wouldn't worry too much about it, the picoatx psu itself seems to be using AWG20 for wires.

-
Those picoatx psus have pass-through for 12v, they only have 12v->5v and 12v->3.3v and -12v dc-dc converters on those tiny pcbs... you'll have to be careful as that picoatx will get HOT (70-90C).

[cheapie]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

I don't know the size of the jack on the Pico PSU, unfortunately. I am still in progres of coming up with the power supply board to distribute from the power supply to all of the computers since I have some odd 20 or 24pin or whatever connector off the PSUs. I'll post a pic in a bit.

They're the same size as pretty much everything that uses 12V. Unfortunately, I don't know what size that is off the top of my head, and I don't have a suitable measuring instrument to measure mine.

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Okay, I got two power supplies Power One 12V 30A. My friend bought them for a Cienna switch that was missing the two power supplies, but they were not the correct ones. He needed the 48V variant.

I took one of them apart to check, it is a very good quality unit. They have a fan but are not annoyingly loud.

I purchased one of these to test:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/161270932210

And now I just nee something like this... Would this work?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/50pcs-x-2-1-...item336cab125c
I don't know the size of the jack on the Pico PSU, unfortunately. I am still in progres of coming up with the power supply board to distribute from the power supply to all of the computers since I have some odd 20 or 24pin or whatever connector off the PSUs. I'll post a pic in a bit.

[mariushm]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Who pays for electricity then?

It adds up, it's a cost you have to keep in mind. Looking at this, it's about $0.15 for 1kWh, so 10 servers using 50w each will cost you about $1.5 a day in electricity.

Then you have to think about air conditioning or cooling the place down. Yes, the servers each uses little power, but the heatsinks of each of those servers will be hot so they'll heat the room.

The power supply is also only 80-85% efficient so those 50-60w dissipated as heat will heat up the room as well.. that will also cost you some money, for electricity to cool the place down.
If you have electricity included in the lease of the place or something like that, you have to check those contracts, because you probably have some limits regarding how much you can use each month.

And then you would also have to check how well the place is wired .. you guys have 110v 16A circuits or something like that, which is low.

If you want to set up a whole rack with 50w servers, you can't just plug them all in a single 1500w max socket, make sure your wiring is up to par in the place where you plan to set up your "racks".

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

I won't be paying for rack space or power.
Of course I would have spare parts.
99.9% NETWORK and POWER uptime guarantee. 6 hour hardware replacement SLA. Easy.

[mariushm]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

I am not out to scam or mislead customers. But okay, I guess the best value in west coast dedicated servers is not happening. You're welcome!

I honestly don't understand how you drew this conclusion from my messages.

I did not say any of that, I was just trying to give you helpful advice.

I simply stated that most companies have an employee physically in the datacenter so that it could handle server reboots, replacing some faulty ram within minutes, stuff that's easy to be done even by some paper pusher.

Some datacenters have their own staff available and are willing to sign a contract with you and then you have one of their guys available in case there's something easy to do, like rebooting a server, adding a stick of memory, replacing a stick etc, and they usually charge something like 15$ for 30 minutes with a few free minutes each month.

You're going to compete with a lot of companies that also offer budget servers and they're going to have promises in their sales pages that are easy to accomplish because they already have the staff employed and they can use this staff for free basically, when they're not busy handling tickets for premium customers.

You may be tempted to offer the same conditions those companies have, but that's not going to work long term if you don't actually have someone all the time where your servers are. For example, can't promise 99.9% uptime, if you're one hour away from server.

If you're going to say on the sales page for these budget servers something like "Hardware replacements within 4 hours" or "99.5% uptime guaranteed" you've covered your ass and you'll be fine even if you're not physically by the servers or you don't have staff there. However, you're still going to keep your promise and replace hardware in that reasonable 4 hours, which isn't going to happen if you don't have spare parts. From your messages, maybe I got the wrong idea that you don't want to have spare parts, to save money... that's not going to work.


A lot of companies also lease their servers from Dell and others, they simply pay 20$ a month for 3 years or something like that and lease 200-500 servers at the same time. With such a purchase, you get good service contracts, they replace hardware the next day if it's faulty and so on. Companies keep a few servers as hot spares anyway, so they could just pull out the hard drive and stick it in another server and user will be up within minutes and the faulty server will be serviced/replaced the next day by Dell/others.

That's how a lot of companies can afford those i3 servers and charge under 100$.. they pay for them in less than 2 years. Once they're old technologically and they're paid, they can be sold to people for 50$ a month or whatever budget prices are, because the cost is basically just rack space and electricity and bandwith, now that 20$ a month that was going to Dell is going into their pockets.

When you're small, you buy hardware outright only if it really makes sense for you, and this would be if it's really cheaper than leasing servers and paying for them for several years.
At about 150$ a server with that mb+cpu+ram+hdd+ psu shared by 8-10 systems, it's probably cheaper than actual servers.. if you don't keep count of work hours needed to make the case, and that datacenter staff may not handle your custom servers... so it may be worth it.

You have to do the math, see how much rack space costs, how much ip cost (do they give you a limited ip count per rack etc etc), see how much you're left after paying for bandwidth and rack space, then figure out how fast you're going to recover your money.

You have a big investment from the start (about 2000$ I guess) for a 3-4U custom server with 8-10 such itx systems + a 8-16 port switch if needed, and if you charge them too little, you're only going to recover that money in 6 months or so.

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Why aren't you aknowledge the postings in this thread?
It's not like there are any evil people here who mean you harm or don't want you to do what you are planning to do. It's quite the opposite.

So the best thing to do is to read the postings in this thread again, think about what you're doing, reevaluate it and come up with a better plan. And not trying to 'run away' in whatever way you are doing right now...

Some of the posts and suggestions in this thread are well thought out, smart, sensible, and helpful. But it doesn't matter.

[Stefan Payne]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

I am not out to scam or mislead customers. But okay, I guess the best value in west coast dedicated servers is not happening. You're welcome!

Why aren't you aknowledge the postings in this thread?
It's not like there are any evil people here who mean you harm or don't want you to do what you are planning to do. It's quite the opposite.

So the best thing to do is to read the postings in this thread again, think about what you're doing, reevaluate it and come up with a better plan. And not trying to 'run away' in whatever way you are doing right now...

[goontron]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

original post got by thunderbird:

Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************

---Quote (Originally by mariushm)---
IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.

If you promise something to the buyers, you have to keep your word.

You don't have to promise 10 minute replacements, for budget dedicated servers it's quite common to have 1 hour hardware replacement or even worse.

But to do that, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SPARE PARTS AVAILABLE. What are you going to do otherwise, order another psu at Digikey and wait 2-3 days and receive it?

Same with hard drives or memory - 1 out of 20-30 drives will eventually fail. Some people will probably ask you to replace hard drive just at the sign of smart errors.. you need a few hard drives and memory sticks available all the time. Can't wait to have drives shipped from newegg or whatever.




You're doing it wrong them. This is not a business that allows you to be hours away from it. If the datacenter doesn't have a room or something cheap/free for people colocating servers there, maybe you should move office closer (but i think you leased office for 3 years or something like that)

Anyway, power supplies don't fail that often. If it happens, replace within 1-2 hours and send emails to those guys saying that broken hardware was replaced.. if you feel like, you can give them a 5-10% off next month, let's say because they won't have 99.5% uptime or whatever you promise.
---End Quote---

I am not HOURS away from it. I'm under an hour away from it worst case scenario during traffic time from home.

Oh, and for these servers, office=datacenter. The business (read: expensive) servers would be real rackmount equipment at HE Fremont2 (not the one with power issues).

Can you focus less on my business and more on custom power solutions. After all, that is the purpose of this thread. Or would you rather I not do dedicated servers and simply push my "Cloud Server" product :P Higher margins for my anyway so you know what, problem solved.

I'm not angry at you; I'm angry at the fact that I can't even ask a legitmate question on the very forum that would be BEST qualified and has the MOST COMPETENT people I know of of any forum, without getting chewed out.

If I were not me you would have said this was a great idea, but because "it's shovenose, it must be fucking retarded" we did not get anywhere.

I was trying to be past this.
Gawd, I should just get my name changed, move to a different country, and rejoin, and everything would be fine.

I guess thousands of posts mean nothing. Thankfully I will be very busy with my new business (yeah, not ShoveHost, that is being "acquired" by my new company onto brand new, fully owned, locally hosted, expertly managed hardware)...

And my main shared hosting server hasn't had any outage in a long time and the last one was because the datacenter I'm with in San Diego moved my server to a different rack)...

So obviously I'm not the stupid incompetent fuck everybody thinks I am.
/endrant
***************

how old are you again?

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.

If you promise something to the buyers, you have to keep your word.

You don't have to promise 10 minute replacements, for budget dedicated servers it's quite common to have 1 hour hardware replacement or even worse.

But to do that, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SPARE PARTS AVAILABLE. What are you going to do otherwise, order another psu at Digikey and wait 2-3 days and receive it?

Same with hard drives or memory - 1 out of 20-30 drives will eventually fail. Some people will probably ask you to replace hard drive just at the sign of smart errors.. you need a few hard drives and memory sticks available all the time. Can't wait to have drives shipped from newegg or whatever.




You're doing it wrong them. This is not a business that allows you to be hours away from it. If the datacenter doesn't have a room or something cheap/free for people colocating servers there, maybe you should move office closer (but i think you leased office for 3 years or something like that)

Anyway, power supplies don't fail that often. If it happens, replace within 1-2 hours and send emails to those guys saying that broken hardware was replaced.. if you feel like, you can give them a 5-10% off next month, let's say because they won't have 99.5% uptime or whatever you promise.

I am not out to scam or mislead customers. But okay, I guess the best value in west coast dedicated servers is not happening. You're welcome!

[mariushm]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Wow, way to make assumptions!
1. This is for the "budget/personal" line of servers. Cheap! There will be a more expensive "business/enterprise" series with actual server hardware or at least new, modern, i3/i5/i7 sort of stuff.

IT. DOES. NOT. MATTER.

If you promise something to the buyers, you have to keep your word.

You don't have to promise 10 minute replacements, for budget dedicated servers it's quite common to have 1 hour hardware replacement or even worse.

But to do that, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SPARE PARTS AVAILABLE. What are you going to do otherwise, order another psu at Digikey and wait 2-3 days and receive it?

Same with hard drives or memory - 1 out of 20-30 drives will eventually fail. Some people will probably ask you to replace hard drive just at the sign of smart errors.. you need a few hard drives and memory sticks available all the time. Can't wait to have drives shipped from newegg or whatever.

2. I do care about quality. That's why I am asking about reliability and of course I would have a spare PSU. It takes like 30-60 minutes to drive from home to office and that's an hour of downtime even if it's a two minute transfer to a new PSU.

You're doing it wrong them. This is not a business that allows you to be hours away from it. If the datacenter doesn't have a room or something cheap/free for people colocating servers there, maybe you should move office closer (but i think you leased office for 3 years or something like that)

Anyway, power supplies don't fail that often. If it happens, replace within 1-2 hours and send emails to those guys saying that broken hardware was replaced.. if you feel like, you can give them a 5-10% off next month, let's say because they won't have 99.5% uptime or whatever you promise.

[tom66]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Most industrial server power supplies use diode-ORing. That means a fair bit of power is lost in the diodes but the swap over is essentially instantaneous.

[shovenose]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

+1000. If you decide to start offering some service, at least do it in a way which will earn you good rep from the start. If you don't give a #!*) about providing your users with quality, they won't give a @)*$ about paying for your services, either.



Bahhahahahhaha.

Wow, way to make assumptions!
1. This is for the "budget/personal" line of servers. Cheap! There will be a more expensive "business/enterprise" series with actual server hardware or at least new, modern, i3/i5/i7 sort of stuff.
2. I do care about quality. That's why I am asking about reliability and of course I would have a spare PSU. It takes like 30-60 minutes to drive from home to office and that's an hour of downtime even if it's a two minute transfer to a new PSU.
3. How do I made it redundant? I could have an auto transfer device across two power supplies? lol.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Custom Server Power Distribution Supply

Any professional in any business like this will have hot spares, an extra power supply, extra ram, extra hard drives etc. If you don't plan to do that, you shouldn't do this in the first place.
Stuff fails, you have to be prepared for that, it's a cost of doing what you do...

+1000. If you decide to start offering some service, at least do it in a way which will earn you good rep from the start. If you don't give a #!*) about providing your users with quality, they won't give a @)*$ about paying for your services, either.

but the real kicker was that the owner of the gated golf course was on the switch that died, so they couldn't get ahold of the owner to open the gates!

Bahhahahahhaha.