Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Green Hosting : Electricity used by a webserver in a year?

[raindog308]

I was trying to calculate (roughly) how much electricity a typical datacenter-housed, rack-mounted webserver takes in a year.

Lots of factors, I know.

300W of power on average per hour? I'm assuming it's very busy during the day, less so during the wee hours. Just taking a guess. Thoughts?

300 watt-hours is 7200 watt-hours in a day, or 2,628,000 watt-hours in a year. So 2.6 Mwh?

There's also cooling, I realize, but I was just thinking about the power at the moment.

[devonblzx]

300watts is pretty high. Most servers we use are around half that under load.

[Brian_R]

Say between 100-300 Watts for a typical range of servers. Add typical datacentre PUE factor of 1.2-1.8 to cover cooling and other losses. This gives a range between 1MWh and 5MWh total power consumption.

[mygreenhosting]

Thanks Brian! Is it fair to say that the more processes a server is running, the more energy it draws?

[Brian_R]

Originally Posted by mygreenhosting

Thanks Brian! Is it fair to say that the more processes a server is running, the more energy it draws?

Well, the busier the CPU is, the more energy it will use (there can be lots of processes running but not doing anything!). Same but to a smaller scale for disks. Memory makes virtually no difference.

For example, I stumbled across this review of a pretty meaty Dell R720 this morning - http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/serve...poweredge-r720. They give measured idle power of that particular config at 120W, and 358W when running at full load.

[HostWinds]

Originally Posted by raindog308

I was trying to calculate (roughly) how much electricity a typical datacenter-housed, rack-mounted webserver takes in a year.

Lots of factors, I know.

300W of power on average per hour? I'm assuming it's very busy during the day, less so during the wee hours. Just taking a guess. Thoughts?

300 watt-hours is 7200 watt-hours in a day, or 2,628,000 watt-hours in a year. So 2.6 Mwh?

There's also cooling, I realize, but I was just thinking about the power at the moment.

That is absolutely insane. Such a huge source of power usage.

[gasyoun]

Originally Posted by Brian_R

120W, and 358W when running at full load.

And what does it calculates per year? Or nobody at data centers measure it? Sure they do, but does anybody know the real numbers?

[Brian_R]

Originally Posted by gasyoun

And what does it calculates per year? Or nobody at data centers measure it? Sure they do, but does anybody know the real numbers?

MWh/year = Server Watts * 24 (hours per day) * 365 (days per year) * PUE (Datacentre power efficiency) /1,000,000

Datacentres certainly do measure it, but in most cases, down to the nearest amp, rather than the nearest watt, so these test numbers are probably more accurate than you'd get from a DC.

Try it yourself - just get a Kill-a-Watt and plug it in to see the power used, I'm sure that'll be how the reviews do it.