TODO: current text focus on HW fro home and community, need to be made more generic

Hardware

Introduction

Concrete Hardware suggestions for TAPPaaS is going to be controversial and will constantly be outdated. Instead we will nail down some boundary conditions, that hopefully can be a bit more stable and be the defining frame for actual selections.

See Examples for concrete examples.

The general design principles is that most of TAPPaaS should be delivered as an appliance. think something like a Fritzbox https://en.avm.de/products/fritzbox/ or the Unify Dream machine https://store.ui.com/us/en/collections/unifi-dream-machine/products/udm-pro

However the ambition of delivered functionality is larger so design become more complicated.

Let us first differentiate between what is “in the appliance” vs what needs to be outside:

Inside the appliance:

Compute for everything
Storage: with Raid
Firewall as a virtualized function: so several ethernet ports
Possibility to scale storage
Possibility to deliver redundancy by having 2 or 3 boxes
Possibility to have a “satellite” for the extended home

Outside the appliance

Cameras
All the home appliances. (strictly speaking not part of the solution itself, but manged by the IT4HOME solution)
The sprinkler controller
The weather controller
THe WAN termination

The Problematic ones

L2 switching, including PoE and LAN support
Wifi access points
IoT radios (zigbee, .Matter) as with Wifi it might be build in

Design constrains and discussion

Generally we are after generic hardware, so that it can be replaced even if vendor goes out of business, and be upgraded without depending on a particular vendor

Appliance

Three options considered:

a bunch of Pi’s: Fun but not really easy to work with as a single appliance and likely not cost efficient for scaling
a proper server: Is typically expensive, and power hungry (and noisy)
a virtual network appliances server: a lot of interesting options exist based on the Intel Atom series. They have server features but low power consumption and price point

Memory: For a good system: use ECC for “satellite” and test non ECC

Disk: SSD in Raid for main server, SSD in non raid for Satellite. Main appliance complemented with spinning disks in Raid for application storage. (ZFS)

At least 4 Ethernet ports (one for server, two for virtual firewall and one for HA sync, alternative for WiFi in Satellite mode). likely 2.5 or 10 G

Networking

In its simple form we plug WAN into the Appliance server port for firewall uplink We plug the LAN into the Server port, and we use the secondary LAN into a wifi Access Point (AP).

For larger/normal installation we need a switch.

several 2.5 G PoE ports to power WiFi and Cameras
a few 10G ports to connect Servers
and some spare ports to route to stuff we want or need to keep off WiFi
switch must support VLAN switching

We need WiFi APs that support VLANs.

Ideally we want something that is standardized and easy to replace but we also want something that is easy to manage and automate

Unify is a great solution for switches and wifi with a great set of integrated management capabilities. Unfortunately it is a closed eco system (This is what I have at the moment)

For now switching and WiFi is not included in the TAPPaaS recommendations, but guidelines for setup is.