Raspberry Pi 1U Server

Electronics
#1

I recently learned there’s at least one colocation provider in Dallas that will colocate a 1U server for just $30-40/month, but that low price only allows using a maximum of 1A of power @ 120V. From what I was reading, most cheap 1U servers (like R620’s) use at least 1A @ 120V at peak, so I ended up cramming as many Raspberry Pis as I could in a 1U server chassis.

This was the craziness that I handed over to the colocation provider yesterday:

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And it actually works! (so far)

I’ve got a bunch of details about the build here: GitHub - pawl/raspberry-pi-1u-server: A power efficient 1u server designed to take advantage of inexpensive colocation.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for V2. I think this could actually end up much simpler if it was easier to get Raspberry Pi CM4s and a Turing Pi 2 board. There are probably a ton of better ways to build cheap low power servers, but I had a lot of fun with this project and learned a lot about colocation.

Also a big thanks to @AndrewLeCody for the inspiration. He hosted a Raspberry Pi for me in a data center he worked at a long time ago.

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#2

I’m actually doing something similar, though I designed and printed a 2U rack setup.

Checkout this tutorial I wrote to get Kubernetes running on my rpi4s: GitHub - aceat64/rpi-k8s-talos-terraform: Deploy a k8s cluster to Raspberry Pi4s using Talos and Terraform

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#3

@AndrewLeCody the printed 2U rack setup is similar to Jeff Geerling’s 1U Raspberry Pi rack mount?: My 6-node 1U Raspberry Pi rack mount Cluster | Jeff Geerling

I totally would have done something like that if the colocation place didn’t charge me per ethernet port. Cramming everything into 1U has been a challenge. I’ve also been trying to make it look mostly like a normal server so they don’t think it’s too weird to host.

Clustering the Pis with K8s is a cool idea. I’ve been needing to learn more about K8s, and I should probably try something like this.

#4

So what are you using the servers for? Or, is this a I can get around your rules “Weird Flex”?
Have fun with your server squids and keep sticking it to BIG IT!!! LOL :slight_smile:

#5

Because I’m lazy, what’s the advantage(s) of using the M.2 SSD enclosure over just a plain ol’ USB3 thumbdrive?

#6

Endurance and performance are two biggies. Typical USB flash drives won’t have onboard RAM buffers and more advanced controllers that do things like flash cell wear leveling.

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#7

@Nick
meme

Planning to mainly use it for small hobby projects I already pay to host, and stuff like a VPN to block ads on my phone.

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#8

I wondered what was out there under 1 amp in the COTS space because this is a problem that seems so foreign to me. Normally 1 amp versus 2 amps or 5 amps just doesn’t matter but here it totally does. Came up with this.

With that processor it has 10 cores at 2.8GHz, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD and it would be around $1400. Geekbench estimates that processor is about 16 times faster than a Raspberry Pi 4. Overall it’s more expensive but the performance for the price is a bit better. I think it would be really difficult to get anywhere near the same price you have achieved because the barebones alone are $750. It would have to be used gear or some really, really, really cheap hardware that I probably wouldn’t trust as much as a Raspberry Pi 4.

Definitely not as cool as the guerrilla Raspberry Pi approach. Also the Raspberry Pi approach forces better management practices because you have to deal with more physical machines. I’d love to see another version of this project! For folks interested in this type of hosting that don’t want to go the guerrilla route maybe this will give you some ideas.

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#9

Lol, Thanks for clearing it up @pawl

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#10

@lukeiamyourfather an ARM server like this Honeycomb LX2 might work well too: https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H08CH/ It is probably possible to stay below 1A at peak with some newer intel stuff though.

I think Honeycomb LX2 board is only supposed to use 40 watts for 16 CPUs. It’s $750 + the cost of hard drives, chassis, and memory, and it might take them 8 weeks to ship it.

It seems like this ARM server stuff is starting to move pretty fast. AWS started doing their new graviton processors recently, Apple has a lot more developers working on ARM with their M1 processor, and there’s a ton of new boards coming out for the raspberry Pi compute module (which still seems hard to get).

Another interesting solution is pine64’s cluster board, but I keep check and it’s out of stock: CLUSTERBOARD | PINE64

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#11

This popped up in my Hackaday feed this morning…

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