Why would you use home-grade "servers" when a startup has access to a variety of cheap cloud solutions? What business market segment in a server space would these mini PCs occupy?
This is more of a hypothetical question. From simple use, the Beelink SER5 I have seems to have better performance than my 13-year-old Macbook Pro, so I was curious about the upper bound / limits of little machines like it.
May I ask what you mean by "a variety of cheap cloud solutions", do you refer to services such as DigitalOcean's Droplet and/or similar products?
From simple use, the Beelink SER5 I have seems to have better performance than my 13-year-old Macbook Pro, so I was curious about the upper bound / limits of little machines like it.
Beware of Beelink. They are known to suffer from weird hardware design issues (i.e., mouse/keyboard activity required to wake up from sleep mode but their USB stack is disabled when entering sleep mode) and are riddled with other hardware issues. I bought one and for example video randomly shuts down a few seconds after booting in without a way to recover.
Their hardware issues are surprisingly not the problem. The problem is that their support is limited to their message board, and it's heavily censored to hide all issues. I bothered to go through their china social credit score process to register a user account to report the issues I experienced and all posts were heavily censored. In fact, the first post I noticed being censored out was a reply to a boilerplate post with troubleshooting tips where I simply said that I tried out the suggestions but they weren't effective at fixing or mitigating the problem. This left their board with a thread where a problem is reported, they chime in with a list of fixes that they automatically post to all problems, and by magic no one bothered to reply.
Azure, AWS, GCP, DO as you noted all have viable alternatives, from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS.
Why run a web server when you can run an Azure Web Site? Why distribute servers around the world to serve as CDNs at POPs when you can put Cloudflare, Azure Front door, etc. etc. in front of it on the cheap?
Anyway, these small machines don't have a place in the modern server room. They don't fit in racks, they lack management features, expandability, replacement parts, warranty, and so on and so forth.
There is more to a server than "CPU goes faster". If a hypothetical server had the fastest CPU available but only provided a single NVMe interface (like many of these small PCs do), it'd be a poor candidate for a critical RDMBS, for example.
Comments
This is more of a hypothetical question. From simple use, the Beelink SER5 I have seems to have better performance than my 13-year-old Macbook Pro, so I was curious about the upper bound / limits of little machines like it.
May I ask what you mean by "a variety of cheap cloud solutions", do you refer to services such as DigitalOcean's Droplet and/or similar products?
Beware of Beelink. They are known to suffer from weird hardware design issues (i.e., mouse/keyboard activity required to wake up from sleep mode but their USB stack is disabled when entering sleep mode) and are riddled with other hardware issues. I bought one and for example video randomly shuts down a few seconds after booting in without a way to recover.
Their hardware issues are surprisingly not the problem. The problem is that their support is limited to their message board, and it's heavily censored to hide all issues. I bothered to go through their china social credit score process to register a user account to report the issues I experienced and all posts were heavily censored. In fact, the first post I noticed being censored out was a reply to a boilerplate post with troubleshooting tips where I simply said that I tried out the suggestions but they weren't effective at fixing or mitigating the problem. This left their board with a thread where a problem is reported, they chime in with a list of fixes that they automatically post to all problems, and by magic no one bothered to reply.
Azure, AWS, GCP, DO as you noted all have viable alternatives, from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS.
Why run a web server when you can run an Azure Web Site? Why distribute servers around the world to serve as CDNs at POPs when you can put Cloudflare, Azure Front door, etc. etc. in front of it on the cheap?
Anyway, these small machines don't have a place in the modern server room. They don't fit in racks, they lack management features, expandability, replacement parts, warranty, and so on and so forth.
There is more to a server than "CPU goes faster". If a hypothetical server had the fastest CPU available but only provided a single NVMe interface (like many of these small PCs do), it'd be a poor candidate for a critical RDMBS, for example.