I generally spend all of my time talking about servers and technology that you will find in the office.  However, networked devices invaded the home many years ago and they are here to stay.

Like many of you in the IT business, you can’t get away from technology at home, and you probably spend an inappropriate amount of time keeping devices running at home. You are also more vulnerable to viruses and poor planning decisions because there is not a group of 100 others checking your work.

Last year I wrote a blog about my home network, and in light of some of the recent changes that I have had on the server side, I thought I would bring everyone up to date on my latest creation.

With the last blog I was talking about adding an HP MediaSmart server to my network after I had found that Microsoft Windows Home Server was going to give me everything that I needed.  Before all of the Linux fans start firing messages out about how I could be doing this with Linux, keep in mind that my user base consists of myself and my wife, who is not technical and just wants something simple. Being able to walk her through the reimaging of her notebook over the phone, while I was on day 1 of a 2 week Asia trip, had me completely sold on the product. As a “home IT administrator”, the home server provides daily backup of all of my clients, media streaming of videos, pictures and music, along with the ability to easily access it remotely via any web browser.  Outside of my company firewall I can even log into remote client PCs to either troubleshoot or even run applications.

However, the HP MediaSmart server was a 4-bay unit, and with 2TB drives it became clear that I did not need such a large box at this time. Seeing the new “Bobcat” core-based APUs gave me an interesting idea; while I did not need the graphic power of the GPU, the low power of the AMD E-350 APU was very appealing.  The HP MediaSmart server with a single core AMD Sempron™ processor in it was pulling 65W at idle, measured at the wall.  I figured the latest technology could do a lot better so I took a trip up to Fry’s, and then opened up the magic closet to find enough parts to build a new server.

Thanks to Gigabyte I had an E350N-USB3 board with an AMD E-350 APU preinstalled to play with, so I added in some new DDR-3 memory and a new Seagate 2TB “green” hard drive. I had an older copy of the original Windows Home Server, eventually I plan to upgrade to their new version 2011, but that is a project for another day.

The motherboard, while being a small form factor, has plenty of USB ports, SATA ports and memory slots.

The build went amazingly fast, despite having the cramped chassis to work with (the board is mini ITX and I was going for a compact system.)

Once completed, the server software installed in about 30 minutes, and I had a new server called “Zacate” on my network. I did need to uninstall and reinstall the Microsoft connector software (guys, if you are listening, there should be a “change my server” function somewhere….) Next time around I am using IP addresses for drive/server mapping.

With the new server installed, I did some quick testing.  I have gigabit between all of the PCs and the server, and the first thing that I noticed was that I went from ~20MB/s on the old server to over 70MB/s on the new server.  Still not gigabit speed, but for a home network on consumer-grade switches, it was a huge improvement.

The second thing that I noticed was power.  The older server was running at 65W in idle mode and the new APU-based server was now idling at 32W, less than half the power.  Because the server is on 24×7, when you do the math, at $.14/KwH it was costing me about $79/year to run the server.  Now the price should be under $40.  Not a dramatic savings when you compare some of the commercial server savings that you see from the latest generations of AMD Opteron^TM processors, but that ~$40/year savings translates into more bike parts.

And, at the end of the day, this is what I have to manage:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.