Home Lab Tidbits #1

Home labs are really starting to pick up some pace with many vendors tailoring products and solutions directly to this emerging market. It’s becoming hard to keep up with what’s coming out. Of those releases, what is actually useful for your home lab? This is an experimental aggregation post that may or may not continue, depending on feedback.

Compute

  • ASRock have a new motherboard, the EPC612D8A-TB this may well rival the Home Lab favorites from SuperMicro.
  • Intel have announced their SoC for Enterprise, the Xeon D. Lets hope some inexpensive Home Lab components are the result.
  • Wanting to build a new system to host lots and lots of storage? The Haswell-E based ASRock X99 has 18 on-board SATA ports.

Storage

  • In the market for a new NAS? SmallNetBuilder has a guide that will help you decide which is best for you.
  • Both Asustor and Western Digital have a couple of new NAS units with decent performance.
  • ServeTheHome benchmarked the inexpensive 240GB Intel DC S3500 SSD and the considerably more expensive 1.6TB Toshiba PX03SNB160.
  • If you want some SLC enterprise class storage, Hitachi have a 100GB SSD that has great read and write sequential performance.
  • Synology keeps their entry bar low with the DS115j.

Network

  • Netgear have a competitor in the cheap 10GbE switch segment. ZyXel have a new 12-port 10GbE switch, the XS1920-12.

Software

  • NAS4Free is pretty easy to get up and running in 5 minutes if you want roll your own shared storage.
  • A little product called vSphere 6 went GA this week.