The hardware · Why now blog
Put the server room on a shelf.
We rented servers because owning one was loud, hot and expensive. That reason is gone. A 25 W box on a shelf now does the work of a 2017 server, for the electricity of a light bulb.
Why we rented in the first place.
The cloud did not win because renting is nice. It won because owning was awful. A proper server in 2017 was a €15,000 machine: hot, loud, hungry, and it needed a cooled room, a rack, a UPS and someone who knew what to do when it beeped at night. Ten years before that it was a rack full of them. For a ten-person company that was a bad deal, so we all moved to someone else’s data centre and paid by the month.
The deal was fair at the time. The problem is that we kept it long after the reason went away.
The same work now fits in 25 W.
Three machines, three decades of progress. The laptop most offices ran in 2008. The server you would have bought in 2017. And a 2026 laptop-class processor that sits in a small, silent box on a shelf:
Office-use estimate: always on, busy 10% of a 40-hour week, €0.30/kWh, assumed system watts without a graphics card. CPU Mark September 2026. The 2008 and 2017 system prices are estimates for those years, before VAT. Grove Oak is its announced price, including VAT.
Read it once more. The small box is faster than the server, costs a sixth of the price, and uses less electricity in a year than the server used in a month. It makes no noise. It needs no room of its own. That is the whole argument.
A processor score does not size an AI model or a busy database. Memory, storage and the actual workload still decide the configuration. That is what a well-designed appliance is for: matching the machine to the job.
Put that power to work.
Buy useful capacity and use it across your services. Give Nextcloud room for the team’s files. Run your website. Add a document archive. Choose local AI models that fit. Your machine can serve public websites and private tools from the same foundation.
OurGrove brings that foundation together: the OS, app setup, updates and tested recovery. Grove hardware uses standard parts so you can add storage, repair it and upgrade it as the work changes. Rack Alpha is our physical prototype; the OS is also planned for compatible hardware you already own.
The opportunity is sitting on the shelf. We’re building the software and appliance that let more people use it.
OurGrove is in beta. We’re preparing for first pilots.