Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Green Hosting : green server that uses .5 amp or less?

[sweet deals]

Can anyone recommend a green server that uses .5 amp or less?

[CraigMesser]

Dell Poweredge R200 usually fits in this requirement with a decent Spec.

[mdharris]

I've custom built some boxes using VIA chips and mini-ITX motherboards/cases. The entire thing ran off of a 60watt power supply, which means it couldn't have pulled more than .5a on US AC current.

[evorack]

Sorry to bring up such an old thread, but the Dell R210s are fantastic for power usage. Ours is a Quad Core 2.4Ghz Xeon with 8GB of RAM and 2 X 1TB hard drives and according to our colo, it idles at 56W. When I had all 4 cores maxed out (Was compiling linux), the max I ever saw the power meter go was about 80W.

Cheers

Jonny
Evorack

[adsenselabs]

atom servers it's very green

[InfiniteTech]

Originally Posted by adsenselabs

atom servers it's very green

There was this huge thread about racking two servers in 1 U (half U each server) using Atom CPUs.

You could load up around 80~ odd atom servers in one rack with just 20 Amps.

Cant seem to find that thread for now.

[pubcrawler]

You have quite a few choices for .5A servers. Unfortunately, many of the boards are not server quality. No ECC RAM, usually lower RAM (1-2GB) support, SATA bus can be a tad slower on them also.

Atom 230, 330, 410, 510 all will suffice. Several manufacturers put out mini itx boards with these. They are say 35-60 watts typically. Supermicro has an Atom build that is popular - two systems in 1U space.

VIA C7 CPUs, again mini itx form factor for these. They have a pretty peppy co-processor for crypto stuff - good for firewall and security servers.

Marvell has a 800Mhz CPU that is being used in various 1U storage solutions. It's RISC based and probably the lowest power usage of any semi main stream systems.

AMD Geode has the LX800 CPUs.

A single quad core L series Xeon CPU should be able to make it near this power envelope given you don't pack tons of 10k RPM drives in it.

Other ideas to minimize your power draw include:
1. using an 80%+ power supply.
2. using SSD or other non-spinning disk
3. limiting the high speed fans found littering many servers.

If you are willing to fabricate a case the mini itx and similar mini boards can be mounted vertically in a chasis like a line card. In 5-6U height you can fit 30-50 of these in standard rack.

[ramnet]

Those new Intel i3 systems use about 0.5 amps at and are far more bang for your $$ than Atom's are.

Atoms are around 0.25 amps.

We're deploying a lot of i3 based systems at the moment....we're very impressed with them.

[pubcrawler]

Curious, Ramnet which i3 CPU you are using?

As per specs over on Wikipedia:

Clarkdale Core i3-533 73W

Arrandale Core i3-3xxM 35W

The i3 is a replacement for the Core Duo's BTW ...

The Arrandale seems like you should be able to pull off a 60W system, but the Clarkdales don't look like they will fit within that range...

[ramnet]

Originally Posted by pubcrawler

Curious, Ramnet which i3 CPU you are using?

As per specs over on Wikipedia:

Clarkdale Core i3-533 73W

Arrandale Core i3-3xxM 35W

The i3 is a replacement for the Core Duo's BTW ...

The Arrandale seems like you should be able to pull off a 60W system, but the Clarkdales don't look like they will fit within that range...

We're using i3-530's and i3-540's (Clarkdales)

They use around 0.4 amps idle and peak at around 0.6 amps under full load (eg: running unixbench) (0.8 amps under full load with hyperthreading enabled).

Under average load it hovers around 0.55 amps.

The above numbers are with Intel's H55 chipset, 8 Gigs of non-ecc DDR3-1333 and 2x high performance SATA drives inside a supermicro CSE-512L-260 (psu/case).

Obviously if you use less memory and lesser hard drives it'll be even lower on the system power use.

Here's a power graph for you from one of our cabinets:

http://ramnet.us/junk/apc-graph.png

That's 3x i3-530's, 1x i3-540, 1x atom 330, 10x performance hard drives (2 per system), 8 gigs of memory in each i3, 1 gig in the atom 330. And an old cisco 3550 layer 3 switch is using about 0.4 amps of power there as well.

3.5 amps for 4x i3's and 1x atom 330 fully loaded along with a heavy old cisco switch isn't bad at all power-wise.

Take out the power use of the hard drives and the cisco switch and each i3 is doing about 0.6 amps each - and nearly 0.1 of that is the big loud heavy duty chassis fan on the CSE-512L-260.

The i3 is a replacement for the Core Duo's BTW ...

An i3-530 benches higher than a Q6600 fwiw. It's a very impressive system.

It may not always be under 0.5 amps for an entire server but it's very, very close to it under typical use.

[FT-James]

I'm surprised nobody's brought up running a slightly beefier server on 220V (if you're looking in the US). Some datacenters can run 220V AC to your gear and that'll effectively slice your amperage usage in half.

Those Atoms are pretty damn nice though, a friend of mine sent me his half-depth 1U Atom to rack up, and it draws next to nothing. He's got Gentoo on it and it does a damn good job of building stuff.

[sanseo]

will any buddy have experience of green hosting servers, Is this safe and provides full functionality and SaaS support.

[pubcrawler]

Originally Posted by FT-James

I'm surprised nobody's brought up running a slightly beefier server on 220V (if you're looking in the US). Some datacenters can run 220V AC to your gear and that'll effectively slice your amperage usage in half.

The voltage doesn't matter whatsoever. All that matters is how many watts your Atom (in this instance pulls). An Atom 330 pulls 28-50 watts depending on load and accessories.

So, let's look at the math of how electric works.

240V power at 1A = 240 watts
120V power at 1A = 120 watts

.5 of A at 240V power = 120 watts
.5 of A at 120V power = 60 watts

See it's all just scaled. No power savings what so ever.

Now if you want to really save power you need to look at gear that is direct DC powered. All computer inside run DC power, mainly 12V and 5V power. Every computer power supply converts the power down to DC power and does so with a lower efficiency, thus costing you watts every single hour on every single power supply that end up just as heat and thus require cooling.

PicoPSU's are in my opinion the best and most compact DC power supplies on the market. It's direct 12V power into the PSU - which can come from a converter block like typical LCD monitors use or it can be done for multiple low power computers from one standard desktop or server power supply or you can directly inject DC from the data center - which such is available. Of course, you can inject solar power, wind or other green generated on site power as well.

The benefit of DC directly is the lack of power losses on each and every power supply. The PicoPSU's are 95% efficient across their line. Compare that to regular power supplies and the industry still is trying to get 80% efficiency, many are even below there.

[pubcrawler]

Originally Posted by sanseo

will any buddy have experience of green hosting servers, Is this safe and provides full functionality and SaaS support.

Green servers are really no different than power hungry ones.

The only differences we can really show are:
1. Lower CPU speeds in green gear.
2. Support for less memory than typical power hungry server.
3. Slower disk speeds and less drive connectors typically.

Now 1-3 can be just as true for many so called power hungry servers.

You should have 0 issues using power saving servers fully and for SaaS.

I look at this industry and the bias against low power stuff this way. Vast majority of all hosting is being done on shared servers that are overloaded with customers and underperforming. That's great ROI for the hosting company and can potentially be a good utilization of resources (total watts versus total dollars). But many such scenarios are just totally messy, hard on the customers, difficult to deal with admin wise, etc.

Further, most of that shared hosting is done with user plans that include lowly specs to the customer - < 10GB of disk, < 1GB of RAM, etc. You can do all that on low powered gear.

There is a business model I believe using super low power RISC processors as dedicated servers instead of selling people shared hosting.

[apexio]

Originally Posted by pubcrawler

See it's all just scaled. No power savings what so ever.

Now if you want to really save power you need to look at gear that is direct DC powered. All computer inside run DC power, mainly 12V and 5V power. Every computer power supply converts the power down to DC power and does so with a lower efficiency, thus costing you watts every single hour on every single power supply that end up just as heat and thus require cooling.

PicoPSU's are in my opinion the best and most compact DC power supplies on the market. It's direct 12V power into the PSU - which can come from a converter block like typical LCD monitors use or it can be done for multiple low power computers from one standard desktop or server power supply or you can directly inject DC from the data center - which such is available. Of course, you can inject solar power, wind or other green generated on site power as well.

The benefit of DC directly is the lack of power losses on each and every power supply. The PicoPSU's are 95% efficient across their line. Compare that to regular power supplies and the industry still is trying to get 80% efficiency, many are even below there.

Your argument of a watt being a watt is perfectly logical -- but doesn't it hold true for PicoPSU's too? You still have to get from AC to DC somewhere (like via the power brick). So you are still converting AC-DC, but with two devices instead of one.

The DC->DC PicoPSU is 95% efficient, but how efficient is the AC-DC power brick for it? For arguments sake, if the power brick is 85% efficient, wouldn't you have an overall (combined) efficiency of around 80%? No better than an 80+ AC/DC PSU? I have thought of using PicoPSU's but their high cost and unproven(?) power savings has discouraged me.

Now if you had direct DC power (like you mentioned) I can imagine the benefit.