Who wants a Xeon-powered, 12-core, RAID 10 … LAPTOP? The exotic laptop lads at Eurocom have just unleashed another in their series of very peculiar contraptions: the Panther 5SE laptop. Eurocom won't like us calling it a laptop: the official name is “Mobile Server supercomputer-class laptop”. Supercomputer is perhaps a bit over the top, even if the computer can pack a 12-core, …
...it's a product for a market. It may not be a big market, but I'm glad for every market that's satisfied.
It does remind me a bit of an actual server I've seen somewhere in the early 1990s. It was a big tower case with a keyboard and an LCD screen (probably monocrome back then) on top. So it looked like a laptop on top of a tower case.
You don't buy one spare battery. You buy 10 of them, and stick them in a 50kg overhead bag, and keep that sucker blowing hot air on the dumbass in the seat in front of you, all the way from New York to London. While you play a mind-blowingly intense game of BF4.
Do you guys think before you write this stuff?
For a computer, as it was then implemented, he was right. They were big, heavy, expensive, used huge amounts of power and needed a trained support staff to manage them.
I don't think that this machine has the same scope for reduction in size, power and price. What's more a standard laptop is good enough these days to demonstrate server software, or you run the job on a cloud server.
To be honest, if you need a basic server to run in a snap, most mid-range laptops would work temporarily for the two to three business days it would take the average IT dept to source a replacement server, and build it - quad core, 16gb RAM, and an aftermarket SSD.
Obviously if you're running a major service off your servers, you should have at least one hot spare server floating around, but most SMBs could run off a £600 laptop for a solid week, I'd wager.
Still, it's an interesting piece of tech at worst, and I'm sure as, for example, a portable test environment for a certain type of highly techincal consultant, it'd be pretty tasty.
Steven R
Over here in Canada (I'm a Brit living abroad at the moment), it still amuses me to see clothes shop signs saying such things as "Black Pant". I imagine a dog sitting there with its tongue hanging out.
Yeah, I know it's technically correct, but my native lingo puts me mostly in mind of the under- variety.
Years ago I worked for a company whose Big Thing was some heavy duty image crunching done in a big Data Centre. We ran a demo in Excel one year and had to do the processing on normal laptops locally which took a hell of a lot longer than the real world scenario of doing it online in the Server Farm which kind of took a bit of the gloss off our otherwise well received offering. Something like this would have been perfect in that scenario. It would also work brilliantly for client site demos or proof of concept work.
Also it'd make a banging gaming rig!
Seams like a very useful tool, to me. It' ain't a laptop, for sure. However, if you consider one of it's intended purposes, as a sysadmin myself, I'd like to have one of these. Consider the scenario: You're a sysadmin in a company that supports 50-100 SMBs and primary schools, each of which has one or two small servers at most. So now, you're supporting maybe 150 servers that have between one and two processors. Many of them will have only 16GB RAM. Some will have even less, given that they support only 5 users. They probably have 1-2TB of data at most. You buy one of these and install a Hyper-V environment. Now, when on of your 150 servers has a hardware failure, you pick up your "Portable Server" and walk into their office, the wind blowing through your hair as you rip of your suit to reveal your latex Super-Tech underwear as you come to their rescue. You plug in your Portable Server and, using one of the Hyper-V guests that you have pre-prepared, you restore their backup (which you check rigorously and frequently) and, within a short space of time, your client is back up and running, while you drag their 5 year old beast of a server off to the scrapyard. You now have a week or two to build a replacement server, rather than a day or two. Lots less stress for you, lots less stress for your client. Success all round.
Yes, as a sysadmin supporting lots of SMBs and primary schools with small scale servers, I'd love to have one of these!
Yes, there is a use... running live demos... currently we wheel about a small rack with a couple of older servers and a rack ups - this would do a similar job, but fit in a bag and produce less noise in the conference room...
but - it wouldn't be as powerful and with all the gear needed, mics, pa, etc the space saved wouldn't be quite so dramatic...
and... an i7 laptop could be specced to do the same job in this disposable data environment
...instead of flooding the market with more identical spec crap. It also costs less that either of the last two Dell rack servers I bought. Only slightly more expensive that an Alienware, (or VooDoo back in the day) and without a funky alien head.
If I was still running a site with more than 5 racks I'd get one for a crash cart. It would have been great for trade shows too, but the 1 network port thing is a drag.
Think dual SFP ports to patch into a 10G racktop switch or storage.
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