Potential Workstation Alternative

As nice as laptops can be, sometimes desktops are just nice to have for pure power. This is especially true for tasks like development where you have loads of applications up, probably have a database cranking, and are constantly compiling or deploying or profiling or debugging etc.

We setup a big ball of servers for a new client recently and being around that equipment for a few days really made me appreciate the speed of those boxes. A fresh restart of JBoss and a complete redeploy of our non-trivial .ear takes 1.5 - 2 minutes on my office workstation (respectably equipped) but only 20 seconds on these new web servers. Queries against large row counts that take minutes on the workstation take seconds or fractions of a second on the new database hardware.

Doing fresh restarts and redeploys and testing against large data sets are only necessary occasionally on my local environment but wouldn’t it be great to not care?

That said, I think (and only half-jokingly) that Dell or another vendor should start offering server-based workstations. If not offering them assembled at least pushing the idea.

Here’s a diagram from the front:

Basically take 2 well-equipped 2U 2950s (or maybe the 3U 6950s if you really want to get crazy), strap them to a vent unit that pushes the hot air back behind your desk, attach legs to the bottom and put your monitor and peripherals right on top of the servers.

Here’s a view from the top:

The position of your desk would be pretty crucial as even though the air is being pushed out of the back those 2 machines being backed up against one another is going to generate some heat. You would probably want to either back the desk into a wall and cut a hole into the office of someone you don’t like or situate the desk against an exterior wall and cut a hole to the outside.

Though this is largely a joke, having 2 servers would be pretty excellent if you could figure out what to do about both the airflow and the noise. Dell’s servers, and maybe all others as well, sound like mini jets at startup and don’t quiet down too terribly much when running steady.