{"id":11236,"date":"2011-05-13T17:36:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T17:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11236"},"modified":"2011-05-13T17:36:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T17:36:00","slug":"server-power-your-private-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11236","title":{"rendered":"Server Power & Your Private Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s pull a Doctor Who and travel back in time to 2003.  Odds are when you bought a server, and you were taking the usual precautions on uptime\/reliability, you specified that the server should have dual power supplies.  The benefit of this is that a PSU could fail (it used to be #3 in my failure charts) but the redundant PSU would keep things running along.  <\/p>\n

Furthermore, an electrician would provide two independent power circuits to the server racks.  PSU A in each server would go into power circuit A, and PSU B in each server would go into power circuit B.  The benefit of this is that a single power circuit could be brought down\/fail but every server would stay running, because the redundant PSU would powered by the alternative power circuit.<\/p>\n

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Applying this design now is still the norm, and is probably what you plan when designing a private cloud compute cluster.  If power circuit A goes down, there is no downtime for VMs on either host.  They keep on chugging away.<\/p>\n

Nothing is free in the computer room\/data centre.  In fact, everything behind those secured doors costs much more than out on the office floors.  Electrician skills, power distribution networks, PSU\u2019s for servers, the electricity itself (thanks to things like the UPS), not to mention the air conditioning that\u2019s required to keep the place cool.  My experience in the server hosting industry taught me that the cost of biggest concern was electricity.  Every decision we made had to consider electricity consumption.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a secret that data centres are doing everything that they can to eliminate costs.  Companies in the public cloud (hosting) industry are trimming costs because they are in a cutthroat business where the sticker price is often the biggest decision making factor for the customers when they choose a service provider.  We\u2019ve heard data centres running at 30C instead of the traditional 18-21C \u2026 I won\u2019t miss having to wear a coat when physically touching servers in the middle of summer.  Some are locating their data centres in cool-moderate countries (Ireland & Iceland come to mind) because they can use native air without having to cool it (and avoiding the associated electrical costs).  There are now data centres that take the hot air from the \u201chot aisle\u201d and use that to heat offices or water for the staff in the building.  Some are building their own power supplies, e.g. solar panel farms in California or wind turbines in Sweden.  It doesn\u2019t have to stop there; you can do things in the micro level.<\/p>\n

You can choose equipment that consumes less power.  Browsing around on the HP website quickly finds you various options for memory boards.  Some consume less electricity.  You can be selective about networking appliances.  I remember when buying a slightly higher spec model of switch than we needed because it consumed 40% less electricity than a lesser model.  And get this: some companies are deliberately (after much planning) choosing lower capacity processors based on a couple of factors.  <\/p>\n