How small a server?

I'm fulfilling a contract to build a server for an academic at Melbourne Uni at the moment, and the project is interesting enough to write up here, as others may benefit from what is being learned. The brief is an interesting one; make it as small and energy efficient as possible while also being server grade quality and very powerful.

A contradiction in terms? I thought I'd find out. I had previously set this academic going with his first server some five years ago. His needs are to be able to run extensive simulations on specialist software while also having full control of system processes, not something that the IT dept at the uni would allow. Hence he needs his own server. The first server did everything he needed but chewed through the power and was noisy and hot. Not something you would enjoy sitting next to.

A disk crash provided the opportunity to revisit the server hardware, thus the request for small and quiet. I had no recent experience in server building with the new small footprint. My last server was for a community project (www.penshurstvolcano.org.au) so I used a secondhand Intel S5000PSL in an Intel SC5299BRP case that I bought for $250. I beefed up the RAM to 8GB and added another disk to the RAID array, all secondhand. Cheap and powerful, but weighs 30kg and sounds like a jet taking off. Overkill but fun to play with.

This new request had me looking at ITX boxes, and their respective components. ITX is designed to be low power, such as you would want for a home theatre PC in the living room; small and unobtrusive, and quiet. And yet there are serious professional quality server motherboards available for these boxes. A brief look further showed Xeon server processors and all the other bits and pieces to make a serious server.

My academic is now excited about receiving his new small server. The build is continuing as the system has to be migrated from the old disks, but the specs suggest a great finished product.

Server specs

• Antec ISK300-150 Mini-ITX case
• Intel DBS1200KPR Server motherboard
• Intel Xeon E3-1230v2 Quad Core CPU
• Kingston 16GB 1333MHz ECC DDR3 RAM
• Western Digital 500GB HDD x 2 in RAID 1
• Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS