[Rack] Intels Xeon plus tons of ultra320 drives

[Andy Isaacson]

On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 10:12:17PM -0700, Carlos Ivan Sosa wrote:
> This is a continuation for my donations mail
> I posted in noisebridge-discuss mailing list.
> 
> The meeting just ended, and everybody suggest me
> mail the list, so here is the main message...
> 
> My employer is getting rid of 6 to 8 Xeon servers
> rack'em and stack'em style, and also we have
> tons of ultra 320 SCSI drives.

If they're rackmount servers, they're probably quite loud.  This means
they're uncomfortable to be in the same room as for long periods.

They're also power hungry and won't do well once their fans fill up with
dust and dirt.

So they're not appropriate for 2169.

Unfortunately the fan problem makes me think they're not appropriate for
most hackerspaces, unless they have a separate machine room.

They could go into a data center, such as Cernio, but that would require
someone to coordinate the donations, installation, and maintenance of
the machines.  Historically that hasn't been very widely supported at
Noisebridge (although I would *love* it if someone did such a project!)

Related prior work includes
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisecloud

So, alas, thanks for the offer, but no thanks, unless someone wants to
step up to manage a data center project.

(Fair disclosure, I have some hardware that I keep meaning to finish
configuring then donate and install for Noisebridge at Cernio; I haven't
finished that project yet due to other yaks that need shaving.)

-andy