The Art of Dumpster Diving

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was “Sweet, going dumpster diving today”. After thinking about it for a little while longer, I started to get a little depressed about going, it seemed almost like a waste of time on a monday morning, there wouldn’t be anything good in the dumpsters!

Despite these thoughts, I called up Joe and we went anyways. Bright and early. 10 oclock.

Now, of course, thinking I wouldn’t find anything, I practically struck gold. After careful observation of the electronics dumpster, Joe and i managed to pull out two old Compaq servers. One 5U rack server, and one enormous tower server. Each has 5 hotswap bays which I am very excited about. Now of course, seeing as they were in the dump, neither are in working condition, but I do plan to change this. Me and Joe will be directing attention to them Wednesday evening to swap some parts here and there and see what will do.

I was very surprised to see that the tower still had all 5 hard drives in it. I believe each one is 4.5 Gb, but since the computer doesn’t turn on, I don’t know for sure. Thats just what the labels on the bays said. The drives could be bigger. We’ll see once i get it up and running. I plan on swapping out the motherboard and power supply with newer ones. and then i can use the RAID controller thats already in there and hook up all the drives. We’ll see if we can get it working.

As for the rack, I’m not quite sure what I can do with that one. It has no drives and seems to only take SCSI drives which I don’t have any of. But i have yet to fiddle with that as well.

Definitely will write more on what happens with these computers soon.

Heres pics:

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3529.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3530.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3531.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3532.jpg

New Rack Server Cluster

Ok so despite lack of recent blog activity, I have been fairly busy doing things. Not too much on the programming side which is really why I haven’t been posting. But lots has happened on the hardware side.

My friend Joe found a steel rack enclosure back behind the movie theater (don’t ask me why it was behind a movie theater because I honestly don’t know), and so we lugged it over to my house and stuck my racks in it. That is, after getting all the racks working. We are still working on clustering the 3 racks together but we are running into some difficulties with that. We’ll figure it out eventually. Anyways, heres pictures!

What Would I Do With A Million Dollars?

I saw a post yesterday about what someone would do with a million dollars. He said he would buy some crazy macs of course. The specs were amazing. Reading that post got me thinking though – What would I do with a million dollars?

After about a good 30 seconds or so, the answer was quite clear. I would make my own data center, duh!

And of course I would save several servers for my own private use for research on Distributed Computing. Because I think that is really interesting and would love to do work with it in the future.

Anyways, I immediately set out to find some hardware that I would use in my new Data Center.

The first thing that you would need obviously is for a Data Center would be a place to hold data. So I found this:
LACIE 300961 2TB Gigabit Ethernet Shared Hard Drive

Connects through a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, and each has a 2TB capacity. VIA C3 800Mhz processor and 256MB of RAM.

Price Per Unit: $859.99

Quantity: 100

Total Cost: $85,999.00

After buying these i would now have $914,001.00 left to play with. Time for some processing power.

I put together a custom rack. Quite powerful in my opinion. Heres the specs:

Custom Rack Unit

CPU:
2 x Intel Xeon X5450 Harpertown 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor

2MB L2 Cache

1333 Mhz FSB and 64 bit support

Motherboard:

TYAN S5397AG2NRF Dual 771 Extended ATX Server Motherboard

Dual 771 CPU Sockets

1600/1333/1066 Mhz FSB

16 x 240 pin DDR2 Memory Slots

1 PATA / 6 SATA II

3 x On-Board Gigabit LAN
RAM:

Kingston 2GB 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM PC-5300 Server Memory

2GB Capacity

PC-5300 Speed

Power Supply:

iStarUSA TC-350R2U 2 x 320w Server Power Supply

24 Pin Power Connector

2 x 350 Watts

2 Fans

Of course, to wrap it all up, I need a case…

Case:
iStarUSA D-200-PFS Black Steel 2U Server Case

1 External 5.25″ Drive Bay

1 External 3.5″ Drive Bay

2 Internal 3.5″ Drive Bays

3 Expansion Slots

2U Form Factor

2 x 80mm Fans

Price Per Unit: $3,875.82

Quantity: 100

Total Cost: $387,582.00

Ok, so now at this point, I have $526,419.00 left to spend. Haven’t even spent half yet.

What is the next thing that any Data Center needs? Internet of course. The data center is no good if no one can access it.

If I were to get 30/15Mbps service, It costs $239.99/month for a 2 year agreement. which comes out to be $5,760 for two years. leaving me with $520,659.00

Now that seems like a large amount of money, but if you really think about it. I would probably use the rest for an office/building, utilities, and repairs and maybe some employees. So now that I look at it, starting a Data Center would be hard because you end up spending more money on other things and less on actual computers. That’s disappointing.