New product released

[johannes]

Bubbas follow-up, BUBBA|TWO is now publicly released, along with a brand new web site. See http://www.excito.com for details.

Hope you'll like it!

[paolol61]

Thanks a lot

[Tompa]

Looks really nice!

Have you made any measuring of throughput for the new platform? Or how much could you expect given the hardware?

The old bubba does around 3MB/s over SMB (maybe some more with NFS). I realize its hard to say exactly but between your thumb and elbow so to speak

/Tompa

[GettinSadda]

Any chance of finding out which Power PC CPU is in this device?

Simply specifying "Power PC" is as much use as saying "x86", probably less.

My current guess is MPC8379E.

I am interested in upgrading, but who would buy a server without knowing anything significant about it's CPU!

[johannes]

The CPU is an Freescale MPC8313E, so yes, almost correct.

[loldrup]

The CPU is an Freescale MPC8313E, so yes, almost correct.

I would like to hear about the considerations you did when choosing the CPU for the BUBBA|two. Much like a review-site would review a number of products, describe their advantages and disadvantages, and then finally choose their favorite. That would bring insight to, and better understanding of, your decision (while strengthening our conception of your guys being nice friendly folks and not some black suits in a sky scraper somewhere far away (the mere fact that we can talk to you on a forum like this confirms this, but we can never get enough confirmation ))

/Jon

[johannes]

Well, not many black suits here, I can promise you that. It's all quite simple; Excito was founded by us four guys who wanted a decent home server ourselves, when there was non on the market.

Regarding the CPU, we reviewed quite many processors and vendors, Freescale PPC, Freescale ARM, Intel X86, Marvell ARM etc. I know you are very performance- and feature-oriented here, but there are a few additional parameters we have to consider when choosing:

- price (of course). Since competitors are popping up, we need to be competitive. It may seem like a small portion of the product, but it isn't when you include the surrounding parts that comes with a more complex processor. More expensive memory, faster busses require a more complex circuit board etc. etc.

- Linux support. We don't have the manpower to make all the OS port and drivers ourselves, we need a platform with good reputation and solid Linux ports.

- Vendor style. Some vendors aren't very interested in cooperating with small players like us, they put all their power to support the high-volume companies. We need to have good support from the vendor in case we would run in to some kind of problem (which always happens btw).

- Product maturity. Designing with a brand new processor is asking for problems. Datasheets for these products are more or less a result of their design specification, as the product matures (silicon bugs are discovered), the errata section grows. A small company like ours can't take too large risks, so a reasonably mature, proven platform and processor is important.

Regarding the technical aspects, throughput speed and built-in interfaces were the most important to us. Gb Ethernet MACs, SATA, PCI, High Speed USB and an internal CPU bus architecture that can feed these interfaces without major bottlenecks is of course crucial.

All this put together, we ended up with Freescale MPC8313E as first choise. And as I said in another thread, Freescale is continously releasing new processors. We are following that closely, and will upgrade when it's suitable.

I hope that was enough detailed answer.

[Eek]

detailed and very satisfying answer, thanx

[paolol61]

Thanks a lot BOSS

[lkbrow1]

I have enjoyed my bubba but the lack of Raid limited how I used it. I am looking forward to upgrading to a Bubba 2. Thanks for the good work !

[msx]

now that was a good explanation very interesting, you guys must be good engineers

[jcw]

Congratulations with BUBBA|TWO - excellent specs and trade-offs!

One question: will it be possible to plug in a 2.5" SATA drive internally? (apart from form/mounting issues and the suitability for permanent-on use...)

Or perhaps an alternative: if an external USB-powered 2.5" disk is plugged in, would it be possible to have the system boot off that disk, and mount the internal one so it can do "hdparm -S" type spin-downs?

What I'm looking for is (very) low noise, with additional hard disks spinning up only when actually accessed. E.g. a 250 Gb 2.5" HD always on, and one or more 750+ Gb disks for archival storage and incidental use.

-jcw

[johannes]

jcw,

Yes, mounting a 2,5" drive internally will work just fine. However, I can't promise that Bubba will be able to boot from USB, but if you use the external eSATA connector, it can boot from there.

However, if you wan't a quiet system, isn't SSD the way to go? We are currently looking at providing Bubba with an SSD option, but we haven't made any decisions yet. There are quite attractive ssd's available now, even though they still are expensive.

[paolol61]

I have the Bubba I and is very quiet, if you get a quiet HD you can't hear him also at night, I use a WD and I will put a WD 1T green on the new Bubba II .
But in any case I personally don't see any problem with noise, is more noising my 3Com hub wich have an inside fan

[jcw]

@Johannes: Thanks. Good point regarding SSD - my thought was: get a B/II asap, and plan to get SSD later when prices come down and storage sizes increase. With the usb + esata ports, there is excellent extensibility, and gbit ethernet + ssd would make a potentially extremely responsive server, even for massive random access tasks.

It's great to hear that you're already looking ahead in that direction, but right now a 250+ Gb 2.5" HD is still a lot cheaper than SSD.

@Paolo: agreed, I use a pair of 750 Gb WD GP's and they are definitely quiet w.r.t. startup, rotation, and seek, but there is still some vibration noise (more with 3-platter disks than with 2, I assume). In my context, where everything else is very VERY quiet 95% of the time, the noise does stand out - and so does a Bubba/I w/ 320 Gb HD - also in use here.

Also, a 2.5" HD uses even less power in such an always-on scenario: a NSLU2 with such a disk uses about 6W.

Anyway - all that remains, is to wait for that gorgeous B/II to be in stock!

-jcw