Blade Server Heatwave

Heatwave no problem for BitScope Blade and Raspberry Pi !

We had an unexpected demonstration of just how robust Raspberry Pi is as a compute platform this week.

If you live downunder where our R&D headquarters are, you will know it's been very hot for quite a while.

Sydney swelters in heatwave conditions (Flickr: Michael Coghlan)

It just seems like it will never end↗.

Recently the mercury topped 40℃ (or about 104℉ for our North American friends) here in Sydney. We know it's hard to imagine from the Northern hemisphere right now but if the airconditioning fails it's quite intolerable, and not just for humans.

Unfortunately, that's just what happened over the weekend just past in our lab and inside it got very hot.

File Server Meltdown

We run a range of computers and some them are servers that run 24x7.

Or they're supposed to!

Two of them are Dell PowerEdge Blade Servers which have been with us for quite a few years, as you can see.

One of them is our office file server and the other is our R&D file server.

Both of them are quite important to us.

Unfortunately, the airconditioning failure was just a little bit too much and the R&D server overheated and failed, taking all the data with it, despite our efforts at recovery.

The other one also died but (fortunately for us) we managed to relocate the hard disk to another computer and recover the data.

Now before you laugh at us for not backing up, we do, and we were able to recover most of the data that would have been lost, but the stuff we'd been working on most recently was, unfortunately, lost.

Raspberry Pi Servers

Meanwhile, on the wall opposite, and in the same overheating conditions, was the pair of Raspberry Pi 2 we threw together up as our redundant office DNS/DHCP server.

This little server had been running for 6 months when we wrote about them just after the Raspberry Pi 3 launch last year.

They have been running flawlessly since then with no more than a few reboots to upgrade them the entire time.

At the time, we added the small hard disk drive with the intention of migrating our file server across to them too, but we never got around to it. Such a shame!

BitScope Blade Duo and Raspberry Pi.

We run about 32 Raspberry Pi in Blade Racks and wall mounted Blade Servers 24x7 in the same office.

Not one of them failed !

We should have moved our office and R&D file servers across already.

We're going to now!

As we wrote a few days ago, we reckon Blade Duo↗ and pair of Raspberry Pi and WDLabs' PiDrive↗ is perfect combination for replacing our old servers.

We'll write up what we've done when it's all up and running. There's nothing like a little dogfooding↗ to prove a product idea.

In fact, we have a quite a few applications in development together with the software to implement them. We'll post details soon and we'll add our new file server to the list.

The fact that we've run our office DNS and DHCP and more recently a pair of WiFi AP from one Blade Duo and pair of Raspberry Pi 3 without a single hitch is testament to the reliability of Raspberry Pi when powered by BitScope Blade. They consume a fraction of the power of x86 based servers, are very low cost, and if last weekend proves anything, they don't need airconditioning or special cooling set ups to work reliably.

GF10K