burnt-resistor
yesterday at 8:46 PM
Hmm, there's might something to this:
+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.
+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.
+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.
~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.
- Laptops lack ECC RAM.
- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.
- Laptops are limited in their storage options.
- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.
- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.
~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.
- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.
~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.
Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.
saltcured
yesterday at 10:00 PM
I think it's one of those ideas that only works with nostalgia or hoarding impulses to support it.
I think normal virtualization approaches are far more power efficient, at a fleet level, than any kind of cluster of laptop scenarios. You can pile in the cores and amortize the costs of memory controllers etc. over a large set of guests.
It is a funny way to get features of both worlds. One reason to want colo (rather than VMs) is for predictability, but laptops still give you the funny throughput problems, because of thermal throttling instead of competing guests.
0x457
yesterday at 10:49 PM
Aside from this probably being a scam or dead project, but they do say they either remove or disable batteries. Either way battery can be removed.
> - Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.
I think "run it until it's dead" kind of thing.
burnt-resistor
today at 1:31 AM
Sure that can work for individuals and small groups with physical separate high availability. It maybe faster and simpler to find another replacement, but I'm thinking about it from a permaculture perspective of sometimes old parts inventory exist somewhere for cheap or it's only a small broken component that could be fixed to avoid unnecessary e-waste contributions and spending more money on consumption to fix a problem.
Typical enterprise server lifecycle is 4-6 years purposefully throws away uncertain remaining potential value because budgets needs to be spent, risk aversion to repairing what's considered "outdated", and possibly acquiring faster and more energy-efficiency equipment. I would guess it's about the same lifecycle length for enterprise and personal laptops too.