My Synology NAS is coming up to 10 years of age, and asking it to do all its usual functions, plus run a few solid Java apps:
... was all a bit much for its 700MHz ARM processor, and particularly its 256Mb of RAM. Jenkins was the final straw, so I was looking around for other low-power devices that could run these apps comfortably. One gigabyte of RAM being a definite requirement. My Googling came up with
Raspberry Pi devices, which surprised me as I'd always considered them a little "weak" as general purpose servers, more for doing single duties or as clients.
But that was before I knew about the
Raspberry Pi 3, Model B+. This little rocket boots up its Raspbian (tweaked Debian) OS in a few seconds, has 1Gb of RAM and a quad-core 1.4GHz ARM processor that does a
great job with the Java workloads I'm throwing at it. And look at the thing - it's about the size of a pack of cards:
A quad-core server with 1Gb of RAM, sitting on 3TB of storage. LEGO piece for scale. I wonder what 1998-me would have made of that!
With wired and wireless Ethernet, scads of USB 3.0 ports
and interesting GPIO pin possibilities, this thing is ideal for my home automation projects. And priced so affordably that (should it become necessary) running a fleet of these little guys is quite plausible. If like me, you had thought the Raspberry Pi was a bit of a toy, take another look!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome - spam is not. Spam will be detected, deleted and the source IP blocked.