With the hardware market costs spiralling out of control, and availability of RAM / server parts becoming a long term lead item, I wondered what everyone is using as their hosts for a small ish production gateways?
Looking at comparisons, costing an on-prem production server is well into the £10 - 20k region, however theoretically the option to buy 3 tower PC's @ £2.5k a piece and cluster them with Proxmox is available, and looks like a very attractive option. Even if 5 fail, Its still cheaper than the initial outlay. Something economics wise feels off!
So open to the table .... what's everyone else using for these smaller systems?
Highly dependent on the application. Most of our deployments could get by with an Edge Panel license, so a fairly basic or mid-tier tower PC does just fine. Others sometimes use panel PCs from Advantech. For the larger projects they typically manage their own hardware/IT and they have the budget for a higher-end machine, or they already have a powerful server and just spin up a VM or two.
For me, the main focus is always the IOPS of the primary drive. It makes a huge difference for the database and Ignition, especially since everything is in the file system now. Aside from that, just making sure you have enough RAM for your specific activities is key.
The biggest hurdle I see, though, is the configuration. To really get the system running smoothly, you have to hard-tune the OS, Java, Ignition, and the database so they have strict hardware boundaries. We find that 95% of the configs out there just use the default settings (which usually just grab a percentage of resources), and that rarely gives you the best results.
At the end of the day, it's not just about the hardware you buy; it's the time spent fine-tuning those settings that really makes the system shine!
