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[newsposter]

I just bought a used IBM blade server chassis from a reseller in Ottawa.

Total cost shipped to me including border clearances is $2000-

The blade center has eleven blades (HS20) of this config: 2x 2.4 Gz dual-core Xeon CPUs, 2 Gb ram, 2x 250 Gb drives, 2x USB 2.0 plugs.  That's the config for *each* each blade.

And a 12th blade (HS40) with 4x 3.2 Gz dual-core (8 cores total) Xeon CPUs, 4 Gb ram, 2x 500 Gb drives.  This blade has 3x external USB hookups.

The chassis has an internal GigE router with 4x external interfaces and a pair of interfaces to each blade.  There are three 2000 watt (dc) redundant/hot swap power supplies, a fully loaded blade center can run on 2 of the 3 PSUs.  There is also a telco 48vdc option but seeing as how I don't have 48vdc in my house.......

The drives are estimated to have less than a years runtime on them.

There is a third-party storage blade available for this rig that will hold either 6 3.5" or 12 2.5" (laptop) PATA drives connected through a pair of LSI hardware raid controllers that in turn can feed the blade center internal router with iSCSI.  The HS20/40 blades can do PTE remote boots so there is potential to replace all of the old disk drives with one big storage pile.

If I want to get back into messing with AIX there are PPC and Power4/5/6 blades available too.  Spendy though.

Might be time to convert the other computers in the house to thin or zero client setups and run everything 'virtual' from The Beast.

Next investment should probably be a used LTO-3 drive and a pile of tapes.

I do suppose that I'm going to have to rig up a way to capture the exhaust heat in the winter and send it directly outside in the summer.....

[FastKayak]

HTPC replaced by HTDC (home theater Data Center).   Last time I heard an IBM blade server turn on it was similar (I assume) to hearing a Blackhawk power up...fans everywhere starting spinning !  It had like 11 of them.

Yikes !

FastKayak / Larry

[newsposter]

Obviously no PCIe slots but with the GigE ports, switch, and a little creative VLAN-ing I should be able to DLNA things all over the place.

The BC I bought has a total of 6 fans including the ones in the 3 PSUs.  All of the fans are variable speed.  So says the manual and control software I just downloaded.

Found a snap-on plastic manifold that collects the fan outputs and runs it into a standard 4" round duct.  This might come in handy if/when I decide to deliberately exhaust or otherwise handle the heat output.

I know that the PPC/Power blades have 2 fans per blade.  I seem to remember that IBM had blades that ran Infiniband, SAN switching (Brocade clone), and there was a 16 port GigE Cisco-style switch/router blade in addition to the small switch/router in the BC itself.  I'll not be running any of those.

When a 'modern' piece of equipment powers up (and this includes consumer grade laptops and desktops), the cooling fans are generally jammed to full-speed for a few seconds to check function.  After a short time the fans throttle down as the thermo-controls takes over.

I don't think that I'll be running all 12 blades.  Bought the box as is (90 day warranty on everything, drives & fans included) because the seller didn't want to split it up.  I see that I can sell HS20 blades on ebay for about $200 each.  Sell 5 of the 11 in the blade center and I've recovered approx 1/2 of my 'investment' (or paid for that storage blade I've got an eye on).

[goatherder]

That would be a nightmare in any home.

The Riley's next on my list for a home MC server. The antithesis of your setup, as it were.

[newsposter]

Depends on how many other things you do at home......

[goatherder]

What could you be doing?

e.g. very likely just 2 of my dual-hex (factory watercooled and therefore quieter under CPU load than some notebooks I use) HP's could monster your entire stack of Conroe-based blades doing a passable impression of a jet engine...?