So someone put a little interface on the SheevaPlug: <a href="http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/develope...</a><p>Was wondering when someone would do that, but apparently, it's been done and done and done: <a href="http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/develope...</a>
Comparing power consumption between commercial server and Plug:<p>365 days = 8760 Hrs<p>Conventional Server:
Assume 100 watts and cost 15¢/KWH(based on commercial hosting service)
Cost/Year: 8760 * 0.1 * 0.15 = $131.40/Year<p>Plug:
Cost/Year: 8760 * 0.005 * 0.15 = $6.57/Year<p>Plug is definitely cheaper and greener.
It's a really cool idea.<p>It's tough however. If your target audience is the main stream public, which it seems like it, then there will always be a mental barrier of learning how to operate yet another machine. Most of this audience don't even know what a server is.<p>Aside from that, you will be competing with every cloud-base service out there, even the ones that are not on the radar yet. You end up spreading your resource to develop interfaces for music, photo, documents, etc, while sites like flikr only need to worry about photo.<p>Personally I'd pick an easier battle field, but then again, what's an entrepreneur but someone who innovates and fights hard battles.
What's frustrating to me is that these SheevaPlugs seem to have enough processing power to be a pretty respectable desktop computer, but they lack any kind of display output. If someone would throw a VGA or DVI port on one of these things, I'd buy it today. All most of my family needs is the ability to run Firefox and Open Office. (Flash would be nice, too.)
For me I enjoy 90% of media from the cloud and have not purchased any additional storage drives in a few years.<p>This looks cool, but I do wonder if the advent of free streaming media (i.e. Hulu) has caused a large decrease in demand for the storage drive market.
Torrent client on the plug will be really cool. I can have the plug switched on all the time and can run the client on it without having to run my home computer just for torrent.
I'm wondering if it might be possible to build one of these with integrated Wifi instead of wired LAN and an integrated flash disk.<p>Now that would be interesting.