Archives April 2013

Wednesday, 17th April 2013 - 11:08:29

24TB Array

The guys were setting up a DAS today in the office to go out to a secondary data center for backup. 24TB - wish it was mine =)

Friday, 5th April 2013 - 22:35:00

You are doing it wrong!

You're doing it wrong! Bit of an oops...

Thursday, 4th April 2013 - 18:46:20

4 Way Power Rail

I've recently set up an ESXi lab with 3 servers. The problem with enterprise servers in a home environment is the noise and the power consumtion - obviously you are not going to want to have a rack full of gear running 24/7 at home. The other issue is the standby power consumption at ~100W each when they are powered down. Some of them have components that run even when the system is off.

The solution: Turn them off after a session in the lab experimenting or studying. Then unplug them.

My servers are in a shed away from the house - so I don't really want to go out there at the end of a session at 12:00AM or when it's raining or whatever. The same goes for powering the lab on.

You may recognise these parts from other projects I've built. The Fermentation Controller was designed to control up to 4 mains devices with triacs. The Fermentation Controller was to be controlled with a parallel interface (which of course nothing has now). The Fermentation Controller consists of two dual triac boards which will switch up to 10A each at mains. They will not be working too hard in their new job controlling only a max of about ~1KW across the 3 servers under load. The brains of the power rail is the TG Watchdog. This is an RS232 controlled board which allows you to toggle it's four outputs using a terminal emulator. This can also be wrapped with an expect script or py-expect etc etc to make it more friendly or automate it.

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