Home labs are really starting to pick up some pace with many vendors tailoring products and solutions directly to this 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
- It looks like ServeTheHome has their hands on one of the new Xeon D SoC motherboards from Supermicro and loaded up ESXi 6.
- Intel have released some pretty cheap Celeron SoC, which might be useful for those with heat / power constraints (4W-6W).
- Benchmarks for the Xeon D-1540 are starting to emerge, and it’s looking pretty good for the price.
Storage
- The storage wars are heating up again with western digital and toshiba talking about 10TB SSDs.
- With huge capacity SSDs, we’ll also need faster small ones, like this new SSD 750 PCIe SSD from Intel
- Buffalo have launched a new NAS series based on the Atom, but this NAS from Thecus wins the cool vote with a built in UPS.
- By far the cheapest NASs I’ve seen are cropping up. Last HLT was the Synology DS115j. Now Qnap have the TS-112P for the ~$100 price point.
- Samsung have released their popular EVO 850 line in the mSATA form factor.
- OCZ are back now that Toshiba are controlling them with the Vector 180.
Network
- No news this time.
Software
- Can’t afford to build your own lab? You could always run up a nested environment on vCloud Air for ~$15 a month. Or there’s always AutoLab on your laptop :)
Other
- While there’s plenty of racks available, the startech 42u is certainly easier to move than most.