What if I went completely insane for a day and got hold of the most absurd hardware solution I could ever have wished for?
What would that look like?
And yes. I will go completely overboard.
And yes, that is a solid understatement.
Updates
I’ve updated the article. I found the pricing of the 1U piza boxes.. approx 75k excluding VAT.. Cheap right?!
Rackmount
Yes, that would be the very first thing I would do.
I would get myself a full-size 19″ rackmount cabinet. Because if you want to pretend you’re building something truly professional, a rackmount solution is the only logical choice.
Yes. I know. How the heck am I going to power a fully stacked rack?
No frickin’ idea!
A full rack can easily draw up to 10kW of electricity. Not to mention how much cooling that would require.
Oh, and… ehh… I can’t hear you.
The amount of noise would be absolutely insane.
Proxmox
Let’s start with Proxmox first. As you all know, I’m currently building a 3-node Proxmox cluster with distributed Ceph storage. And because using three normal boxes is clearly not enough, let’s go completely overboard.
I will settle for just three 1U Supermicro Hyper A+ Server AS-1126HS-TN ( https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/hyper/1u/as%20-1126hs-tn?utm=smclpp )nodes.
As three is the bare minimum for Proxmox quorum. I could also go for 15 of em. Redundancy. okay?!
Some key features:
- Up to 384 CPU cores per node. 1152 cores in total
- Up to 24×48 ( maybe even 96Gb per DIMM ) 1152GB of ECC memory in each node 3TB memory in total
- Dual 2600W redundant power supplies.
As a boot drive, a modest 960 GB NVMe should be sufficient.
The four regular drive bays will be reserved for Ceph.
Naturally populated with 3.8 TB drives.
(They don’t let me select anything larger in the configurator. Apparently, even insanity has limits.)
This should be sufficient to run a “Hello World” VM, right?!
I did mention in the beginning I would go completely overboard… hehe.
Pricing? No actual clue. I’m not going to bother Supermicro with a quote request, but I strongly suspect… not cheap.
@Supermicro: if you’re reading this, I am curious though 🙂
Update: Approx 75k each.. Cheap right?!
Not to mention the insane amount of noise these machines would produce. I’ve owned two 1U Supermicro servers before.
Let’s just say “quiet operation” was never part of the design goals.
Network storage
With this “small” Proxmox mini-cluster, my DS923+ NAS suddenly feels wildly under-equipped.
So let’s create a proper storage case.
LTT recently introduced me to the perfect drive for this scenario: the Kioxia LC9, offering an eye-watering 240 TB per drive.
Yes. You read that correctly.
240 TB. Per drive.
Obviously perfect for a small, modest 4U custom NAS system in my 19″ rack.
Why not take 50 drives, drop them into a Storinator-style enclosure, and casually build a 10 PiB storage box
(yes… 10 petabytes!)
That should be enough to store my Linux ISOs for at least the next two years. Probably.
Not including the enclosure itself, those LC9 drives are not cheap. In fact, they might go for as much as $40,000 per drive.
So… 50 drives…
Let’s just say I don’t have that amount of cash casually sitting around.
And before you ask: my OnlyFans
(linking to that gloriously dumb laptop fan article ) is not going to fund this project either 😛
And ehm…
with almost 10 petabytes (yes, petabytes) of free space available,
let’s populate that with the 6 TB (yes, terabytes) of data I’ve currently collected.
…ehmm.
Networking
And with all those Linux ISO’s stored! I surely have to copy them as fast as possible!
So 100 GbE networking it is.
Mellanox, HPE, Dell, MikroTik — pick your poison.
If it speaks 100 GbE, it’s good enough for me.
And of course… everything is redundant.
AI/LLM
With only about 10U occupied in the 19″ rack, there’s clearly plenty of room left to escalate things even further.
So why not build my own local ChatGPT / Claude / Copilot clone and casually add a “small” server equipped with a few NVIDIA H200 GPUs to run a sufficiently large LLM.
Should be doable.
…Right?!
Other stuff
And of course, a proper rack is nothing without a small UPS. Rack-mounted KVM switches, so I can actually administer everything.
And next to the rack… a correctly sized cooling unit. Naturally, all that heat will be reused in winter to heat my house
(and probably the neighbours’ as well).
Because hey… I’m green!
Overboard enough?
So… is this overboard enough?
Did this article make you smile, or maybe even laugh out loud, just like I did while writing it?
If so, mission accomplished. Hehehe!
And if a CEO — or anyone else — from Kioxia, Supermicro, Samsung, Dell, Mellanox, HPE, MikroTik, or NVIDIA ever happens to read this…
You know where to find me to build this completely insane mini data centre.
WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Brain out.