If you're going to use VMs or containers when you definitely want more RAM. The CPU looks fine though for that use. If you're using it as a media server you'll get through 500GB in no time at all, so make sure you've got space for more drives.
I've had success using FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) for this sort of thing in the past. That's got the Jails feature for virtualising apps. I haven't used Unraid or proxmox so can't compare it to those.
Thank you! Yes, I'd really like to do this in a future version, I've mentioned a bit more detail on some other replies. It'll be quite an expensive thing to develop which is why I went with this for now. It'd certainly make for a much tidier setup.
If you were to lose the front panel sockets and do the switching on board then it's possible to pack quite a few into a 19" width. There's also space to fit 2 compute modules per blade, so in theory it could get quite dense. Cooling would definitely be the issue. I suspect with powerful enough case fans it should be workable.
Thank you, much appreciated :-)
The feedback's been good so I'll hopefully get this available to buy soon. I think somewhere in the $800ish price range without the CMs, which hopefully is near to home use price range.
The Pi shortage was definitely a nightmare. I wouldn't have bothered with this even at the start of the year as you just couldn't find the kit. It does seem to have eased now, though. Digi-Key and Farnell have had good stock levels of CM4s for the last couple of months and the CM5 can't be far away now. I've found performance of CM4s with NVMe SSD's are pretty good, certainly enough for my use cases. Blades like this aren't much use for storage servers though, not really enough storage options. I wouldn't rule out doing a purpose built storage server at some point though, my home network has a couple of big NAS boxes with 20-odd SSDs and I'd love to replace those!
I think I'll probably do something like that. I'll make it available as a full prebuilt unit but I'll open source the design files for anyone that really wants to DIY or build their own spins. I've deliberately used an off-the-shelf case and PSU, and only components easily available in distribution, so that it's easy to get the parts.
Yeah I'll do a proper blog post on this in the next few days and then open up the design files on a public repo. I've got a new version of the blade being manufactured now so I'll upload the design once I've got it back and made sure it works. (The current version I'm using works perfectly except that I never noticed that I connected the USB the wrong way round, so I had to bodge-wire that out on my own units!)
Totally understand what you mean. My background is as a freelance programmer and I have my own business doing this. I've never commercialised any hardware (though I've built plenty of stuff for my own use) so it's a bit of a leap into the dark. I don't imagine there'd be huge volumes so not expecting to make my fortune from it. I built this for my own use and now it's done I'd be happy to make it available as a small run thing.
I'll do a blog post with more design details soon and open up the design and firmware stuff on a public repo. It's all done with open source tools anyway, all the design is in KiCad as I don't do enough hardware work to justify the cost of something like Altium!
Yeah, at the very least I'll hand-build a few units with the spares I've got here and make those available. If there's enough demand I'll potentially do a full production run. I'll open source the designs too so folks can have a proper poke about in it :-)
I'll probably do both! I've only done a rough costing so far but I think it'd be somewhere around $800ish USD for a 10 blade unit (without CMs of course.) I'll also likely open source at least the schematics and firmware for if anyone fancied making their own version of it. I'll do a blog post at some point soon about the design, and another once I've thought more about sales.
Jeez, I'm a bit jealous of that compared to my 1g/1g service in the UK at £260 per month! I hate to think how much a commercial router/firewall fast enough to handle those kind of speeds would be. As others have suggested, building your own and running something like pfsense or vyos is the way to go. Best of luck, you're getting a fantastic deal there!