Is early 2010s Enterprise "Vintage" yet? The struggle of preserving the ProLiant BL460C

[boteh35959]

Hey everyone, I’ve been spending my weekends lately diving into what I’d call "heavy metal" vintage—enterprise-grade hardware from the early 2010s. I know many here are purists for 8-bit or DOS-era machines (which I still adore), but there’s a certain charm to the data center beasts that used to run the web. Specifically, I’ve been messing around with an old ProLiant BL460C I saved from a recycler. It’s rocking a pair of Hexa Core 2.1GHz Xeon processors, and while it’s not exactly an Altair, it’s definitely a relic of a different era of computing.

The specific point I’ve been struggling with—and what I wanted to ask the community about—is the proprietary ecosystem involved in this generation of server. It’s one thing to find a generic ATX power supply for a retro tower, but trying to power up a single BL460C blade without the massive C3000 or C7000 enclosure is a total headache. I’ve seen some hobbyists attempt to build custom break-out boards just to feed the 12V rails directly to the blade's connector. It makes me wonder if these blade systems will eventually be harder to preserve than even the rarest 70s hardware because of that total dependency on a massive, loud, and power-hungry midplane.

I personally remember seeing these in racks and being amazed at the sheer density, but having one on my workbench now is a different story. The "jet engine" fans are a stark reminder of why these weren't meant for home use, yet seeing those 6 cores per CPU show up in a legacy OS is strangely satisfying.

Do you think we’re going to see a specialized preservation movement for these proprietary blade systems, or are they destined to be scrap metal because the barrier to entry (the chassis) is just too high for the average collector?

Tags: Vintage-Computer, ProLiant, Xeon, Server-Hardware, Blade-Servers, Enterprise-Preservation

 

[mark0x01]

When compared to a mainframe or mini they are just tiny.
I have been in a position to obtain them, but decided against it as they aren't really old enought to interest me.
They don't demand too much power with a blade or two, but do require a minimum of PSU's and fans to make them operational.
Repairability is also extremely low but useful for a source of cpu and ram.

 

[NeXT]

The word "vintage" implies a prerequisite timespan, so yes a vintage 2010's server is a thing.

I've never really seen the desirability for servers from the 2000's and 2010's. It was the beginning of high-performance cluster and blade systems and the first datacenter slice machines but they are impossible to run for any meaningful amount of time, even if to spin up an IRC server or host a website. If they aren't absurdly loud you can have an 8-slice blade box that needs several thousand watts. Unlike say, an SGI Challenge L where it's still 1100 watts on a good day, you can afford to leave that running for a weekend. You can't do that with this hardware.
Case in point, behind me is an HP DL580 G2 with four Xeons, 16gb of ram and 28 disks spread across two StorageWorks SCSI arrays. It's cool, but it also eats more power than my Origin 2100.

 

[Unknown_K]

If people can get old full-sized VAX running, I don't see why they can get those up as well, assuming any are left in 30 years to try. You could run them in the winter in place of a space heater if you can deal with the noise.