Yesterday we received 2 large shipments of nodes and gear for DC.
This had a total of 57 motherboards, most of which are atoms, 3 for storage nodes.
Several highend, 80+ Platinum Seasonic PSUs, big bags of ram, a bunch of NICs (20+ or so), and a bunch of SATA 7200RPM drives, some small RAID adapters etc.
We are expecting couple more big shipments during this week, or early next week, which should contain 10+ AMD E350s, and a bunch of Atoms more. Then the smaller shipments of 10-20 items each of NICs, picoPSUs etc.
We should have pretty much everything in hand to build about 50 nodes now, including storage for them. The latest big storage node is still almost empty, Solo 7 hasn't been taken into production yet, and remaining parts for Solo 8 are about to arrive this or next week.
Further, the NICs to be used in all future nodes has been upgraded, and we are also updating the older ones, stack by stack. Almost every single node will receive a high quality Intel NIC from now on, with very few exceptions, with the exceptions being mostly PCI-e NICs, for which we have tried to get higher quality NICs as well.
We are going to be insanely busy assembling all these units! And going to prep for a night when we get a bunch of friends as well to help us, so that we can properly mass produce these. Meaning that the motherboards get assembled real fast for testing. For example, 1 guy unwraps the mobo and installs RAM, next guy installs buttons + leds and hot glues them in place, next guy puts in riser card + nic and writes down the MAC address, next guy places the NIC in place.
Then the finished pile is taken to a testing station, where about 5 of them are powered up at a time, and booted up to see if it everything functions. This software testing phase takes about 5mins per board minimum.
50 nodes to be tested, so time taken to do all that:
Testing 7.5min average: 375minutes
Unwrapping everything: 3mins each, 150 minutes
Placing all components on the board: 5mins each, 250minutes
Hot glueing, and attaching the components firmly: 5mins each, 250minutes
Total before racking: 17 hrs
Building the stacks, writing documentation, 8 nodes per stack, 6 stacks, 60 minutes each: 6 hours
Prepping the PSUs: 4 PSUs, 60 minutes each: 4 hrs
Prepping the relay boards, 3 boards: 90 minutes each: 4½ hrs
Racking and wiring: 30minutes per stack, 3 hrs total
So we are looking at about 34,5 hours total minimum before getting to start booting them up.
That is still excluding the networking work, building and testing the storages, rack preparation, cooling preparation etc.
So before we have all these units online, we are easily looking 2 weeks of work.
But hopefully, by the end of November, we have a nice surplus amount for within the day deliveries - except most likely our resellers at that point of time will want to take all available units, except a few.
But, then comes december with MORE nodes to enter production, next big storage unit, another big shipments of hardware! :)
3d Printing:
Our "homebrewn" 3d printer made it's first successfull test prints yesterday! Calibration and optimization work remains, speed and print quality needs to be brought significantly up. Then we can begin on prototyping on our DIY Blade Chassis's.
We are contemplating on making the designs open source and or selling finished units when we reach mass production on those, excepting around january.
Initial design will incorporate 16 units per 4U. In this 4U there is 6x cooling fans, 1x PSU, 1x Relay board. The Blade trays will be cooled via underpressure, ie. the fans suck through the trays, this way we get more even airflow through all the blades, given the trays are sufficiently restrictive, and can have fewer number of fans while maintaining adequate airflow for low temps operation.
The airflow gets into the middle of the blade chassis, where is venting holes for venting the hot air through upwards through the middle, and all the way to the top of the rack.
This is the initial design, only testing and production will show us what needs improvements.
Onsdag, November 6, 2013
