You can make those rackmounted servers as loud or as quiet as you like. For home, optimize quiet (and low power consumption).
Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.
The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.
Supermicro sells Atom-based SKUs with enterprise features like a BMC+IPMI, 10Gb SFP+ ports, ECC memory, SFF-8087 ports, chassis intrusion detection, etc.
And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server? Given the choice between a 1U server whose fans even at minimal utilisation can still be heard three doors away and something with a low-power/laptop-grade CPU that does the same job silently and with little power use, I'll take the latter.
Not quite, this thread was about encouraging people with interest in open hardware to have a home server rack.
That said, it's not clear here what people in the thread even mean by "enterprise grade". Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.
Enterprise grade simply means top quality hardware such as Supermicro boards, ECC RAM and quality components built for 24x7 use for many years. Some of it is enterprise-y features like remote management which is fun, but hardly necessary at home. I do admit it is fun to access the remote management console of my rack servers from my home office, although clearly I don't need it since I can walk 30 seconds down to the garage and access the console directly. But of course a home rack is something to be done for fun, so fun counts as a feature.
> Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.
It's not?
Isn't it like enterprise grade software which is anything that costs over $50,000, sprays its files all over the filesystem, takes half a dozen full-time IT admins round the clock to keep it running, and has more bugs and 0day than an undergraduate student assignment?
Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.
The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.