It’s easy to be dismissive of the humble Raspberry Pi. In many ways it’s painfully limited by slow I/O, meager compute and a reliance on an microSD card to boot. But despite these shortcoming, and perhaps because of its bargain basement price, the board has found a hoard of devotees. Keith Townsend looks at how the Pi could find a home in the data center. He makes a good point, despite being low power, the compute on it comes like my favorite pizza, “cheap and deep”.
AMD and ARM Make Their Case for the Data Center in Gestalt Server News 17.5
On this edition of the Gestalt Server News:
– AMD makes a play for the data center with Naples
– AppliedMicron and X-Gene 3 hope to compete with x86
– Microsoft Edge let’s the cat out of the virtual machine bag
Plus: The MacBook Pro dongles you shouldn’t buy!
New $10 Raspberry Pi Zero comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
The Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of its most diminutive computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The $10 compute now includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making it an ideal starting point for the home IoT tinkerer.
Alternatives to Intel’s New $8898 Top Dog Xeon
Have about $9,000 to spend on the new Xeon E7-8894 v4? Want to know what else you can get for the money? We’ve got you covered.
Raspberry Pi Foundation Launches New Compute Module
The Raspberry Pi Foundation just launched an updated SKU of their Compute Module, now with an upgraded CPU and memory. The original Compute Module was released in 2014, and essentially brought a first-gen Raspberry Pi hardware to an Internet of Things form factor. The new Compute Module doesn’t stray far from these roots.
ThousandEyes, Network Shaming, and Google Fiber in this week’s Gestalt Networking News 17.1
Welcome to new year of Networking news from Gestalt IT. In our first newsletter of the year:
– The flaws of Google Fiber
– 2017 Predictions
– The issue of network shaming
Plus looks at ThousandEyes, Netbeez, and more!
Walk on the Client-Side with NetBeez
NetBeez let’s you setup wireless network agents on just about whatever hardware you want. But they’ve got a specifically tuned version for the Raspberry Pi. In fact, if you want to get fancy, they’ll sell you a Raspberry Pi in a NetBeez enclosure with everything preinstalled. Seeing this made me think the configuration might be a little intimidating. Regardless, I decided to try it for myself. It’s a compelling little package.
Starting from the Bottom: Client-side Wi-Fi Monitoring
There are no shortage of tools for monitoring and analyzing network behavior from behind the access point. But as Drew Lentz points out, this ignores half of the network. While great pains are taken to build and maintain wireless infrastructure, network engineers need to be able to see how users are experiencing it. In order do understand how end-users are experiencing a wireless network, you must become one of them.
Can a $72 Computer Beat Amazon’s Cloud?
Amazon Lightsail lets you run a virtual private server for $5 a month. A Raspberry Pi 3 and a Western Digital Pi Drive runs a total of $72. Can the humble Pi provide a better experience than Amazon?
Google’s new “Android Things” OS hopes to solve awful IoT security
I’m heartened by Google’s promotion of Project Brillo into the more official but awkwardly named “Android Things”. Lazy naming aside, it should provide a reasonably secure, updatable and transparent network communication fabric for IoT device. The problem still is that it currently only supports platform boards, Intel Edison, NXP Pico, and the Raspberry Pi 3. Still, a player with Google’s clout goes a long way to pushing a standard.