Last spring my home server, which ran on an HP desktop tower that I had repurposed after buying a Dell desktop, died. I ran FreeNAS because it worked well and was free, but I upgraded to,Windows Server 2012 Essentials after buying a used Dell Optiplex server that I got from a local business that was upgrading. Everything seemed state of the art until today when a Microsoft employee posted his home server specs.
Emmanuel Bergerat recently put together a home server that is geek heaven. This is not a tower computer sitting in your home office, as mine is. This is a full-blow rack housed in his basement.
What is included? Here are a few specs.
- 7 physical servers
- The equivalent of 115 GHz of CPU power
- 112GB of RAM
- 44 TB of mixed SSDs and HDDs storage, in both DAS and SAN configurations
- 1GBps Ethernet & 10GBps InfiniBand networks
- Redundant Internet connections
- It mainly runs Windows Server 2012
- but also runs 1 VMware ESXi and 1 XenServer hosts
Bergerat calls this an affordable solution, but I suppose everything is relative. He also goes into a lot of detail in his post regarding what he learned when building this and what he suggests. He also made me feel very inadequate about my home.