Japanese Firm Sells Tiny Linux Server in the States

Published: April 2, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

An intrepid and innovative Linux distributor and system manufacturer based in Japan called Plat'Home that opened up offices in San Jose, California, last year wants to bring its tiny Linux servers to the United States. This week, Plat'Home announced the availability of its palm-sized OpenBlockS Linux-based server in the U.S, and it is hoping to see some uptake in this new market for this and related baby Linux boxes.

Plat'Home, which was founded in Tokyo in 1993 as a commercial Linux distributor with a product called SSD/Linux, launched its first servers in 1996 and went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000. The company had around $3 million in sales in fiscal 2007 (ended in March 2007) at current exchange rates, which is a lot for a company selling palm-sized computing devices that are entirely network-based. (Meaning, they do not have keyboard, mouse, or video plug ins.)

The first product that Plat'Home is bringing to the States is called the OpenBlockS server, which is based on IBM's 266 MHz PowerPC 405GPr processor. The unit, which is 4.5 by 3.2 by 1.5 inches, has 128 MB of main memory, two 100 Mbit Ethernet ports, a serial port, and an internal Compact Flash slot that can have a 16 MB flash drive. There is also space for an internal 2.5-inch IDE disk drive if the flash is not big enough. The machine can also be equipped with the PowerPC variants of NetBSD 4.0 Unix and Debian Linux 4.0. No matter what operating system customers pick, Plat'Home configures the machine with an FTP client and server, a Web server, DHCP and DNS servers, a Telnet server, a firewall, and PPP client software for linking Web browsers to the Internet--all for somewhere around 4.5 watts of power consumption.

The company's higher-end product, which is not going to be available in the United States until a month or so from now, is called OpenMicroServer, and this is a more powerful device that has Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities, which means it does not even need its own power supply to operate. This unit is a bit larger, at 9 by 4 by 1.3 inches, but it packs more features. First, it is based on a 400 MHz Alchemy RISC processor originally from Advanced Micro Devices but now controlled by Raza Electronics. The unit has the same 128 MB of main memory and 16 MB flash option, but it also sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as the 100 Mbit Ethernet port it can use as a power source. Depending on what components are being stressed and what options are installed in the box, the OpenMicroServer burns between 7.6 watts and 9.1 watts. The unit does not have room for an internal hard drive, but it can have external USB drives. This device also comes with a special rack-mounting kit that allows up to four units to be put in a standard 1U rack space. The same operating systems are supported on the larger machine.

One use for the devices is to add some virtual private networking applications to it and then use them to remotely link people and other devices (like the proverbial vending machine) to a network in a secure manner. (The company sells a VPN program call PacketiX VPN 2,0 for just this purpose, in fact.) There are also bundles for Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Web applications, load balancing, wireless access point serving, Webcam surveillance, spam filtering, and other applications. There is even a stack for the devices preconfigured to support blogs. These applications are just open source software, of course. But the idea is that they run on a very tiny device and have tech support from a vendor behind them.

The OpenBlockS server is available now and costs around $440; OpenMicroServer is expected to sell for around $540 when it is available.

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