Even though I'm officially retired from the Computer Science business, I still maintain a server farm in my house. I have 4 Linux servers running parallel processing software, my laptop which runs Mint 18 and controls all the other machines with VNC, 1 dual boot Linux/Windows 7 machine to test Windows compatibility stuff, and one Windows 10 machine (actually my wife's personal computer), and 2 other laptops with a version VM on one, and MVS on the other (just because I can).
You can take the boy out of science, but you can't take the science out of the boy. Roughly translated that means "total geekdom".
I'm finishing up (I hope) a new patent this week. Rain for the rest of the week should keep me focused.
I used to do this. Had racks of machines and network gear at home for various training and other duties. Now I just spin servers up on AWS or DigitalOcean for pennies when I need them. Let someone else pay the power bill and deal with the space needed.
Automate the spin ups with ansible... takes a little getting used to at first, but once it's set up, there's no point in maintaining hardware that went obsolete the day it was purchased anymore for servers. If they're task based servers, shut them down when not in use and most of these places charge next to nothing when they're not running.
About the only time I need local hardware is for mass (audio and video) storage. Takes too long to upload on rural internet. If I was still in town, I wouldn't even care about that. Or attachment to oddball local hardware like an SDR dongle or Arduino/microcontroller project. But most of those projects can be handled with a sub-$30 Rasperry Pi or similar. Only the heavy hitter SDR stuff needs a big CPU and that's available in the desktop or laptop. No need for a local server.
Economies of scale have killed local server hardware unless specific needs like mass storage are needed.
We've already seen sysadmin candidates who've never racked and stacked a data center. They've never touched hardware and may never in their entire career if they go into big company systems. That'll only become more common as time goes on.
The NetApp sales guy called again last week. I told him we'll probably never have a corporate need for such a box, ever again. We have users hanging off of a cheap Synology that does everything and more that the early NetApps did when I first used them, and even that's likely to go away this year in lieu of cloud storage. All depends on if someone thinks the data needs to be in a room we physically lock up, and frankly, the big data centers are better physically locked up than anything we could possibly afford or do. The Synology backs itself up to an S3 bucket, too. LOL.
I told him he'd probably best start courting Amazon if he wants to make commissions and eat. I'm quite content being out of the dead drive swapping business.
