What to do with a beefy server? - eviltoast

Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.

All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).

I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).

Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.

  • downhomechunk@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    That seems like a pretty substantial investment for something you don’t have much experience with or a plan for what you’ll do with it. I’m not criticizing. I’m actually kind of jealous. Maybe figure out how to host your own lemmy instance!

      • downhomechunk@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, and he’s got plenty of room to let his logs get completely out of control! My home instance has trouble with that sometimes.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOP
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy instance would be cool - my biggest concern there is the whole issue Lemmy had w/ CP a few months ago where one person posts it & of course, due to how the fediverse works, that gets downloaded onto everyone’s servers. Seems like it could be a problem.

      Otherwise - I do have quite a load of experience on the hardware-side of things, and do love me a good setup. It was more of “I know I’ll do things with it, I just don’t know exactly what just yet”, and after years of lusting after something like this, I’ve finally got the capital to pull it off. Plus a handful of really good deals I got, of course.