Hi,
I thought I’d post my latest project. I use a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute modules as servers and decided to build myself a custom blade server to host them. This is replacing a bunch of old Intel rack mount servers on my home network - it’s a lot less power hungry! It’s been through a few iterations and is now working really well. This is the server:
It’s a 2U rack mountable unit, in an off-the-shelf ABS case with some custom 3D printed parts. The server takes up to 10 of these blades:
It’s got gigabit Ethernet, USB-A and HDMI on the front and an NVMe SSD slot on the board, along with an SD card slot and a battery backed real time clock. There’s a little OLED on the front displaying information about the blade, including the name and IP address to make it easy to identify for maintenance. There’s also an RP2040 on it for management.
The blades plug in to a custom backplane which provides power and centralised management. There’s an LCD front panel providing basic tools for powering on and off blades and status information, and another compute module which acts as a management web server. It can be used to upload flash images to the blades via the backplane, and provides serial console access to the blades through the web interface.
I’ve been using this for a while now and was wondering if other folks out there are interested in it? It would be quite quick and easy for me to turn this into a product for sale if there was a market out there for it.
Please let me know any comments or suggestions you have, any feedback is appreciated!
Alastair
Definitely interested in the boards and backplanes. Any plans for expansion (i.e. ribbon cable connected PCIe)?
There’s a few pictures of these in some of my other replies, and I’ll do a full blog post on this in the next few days.
I’d really like to do a version of this with an on-board Ethernet switch. It’d be really nice to do all the switching on-board and just have a single 10GbE uplink to the outside world. 1GbE/10GbE switch ICs with 11+ ports are pretty expensive so I’ll probably see if I can sell a few of these ones before I try that!
Haven’t really thought about other expansion beyond that but definitely interested in any ideas! Do you mean making it possible to connect PCI cards to the blades?
This 100% would be a killer feature for me