[Gllug] Cheap rackmount servers

[Nix]

On 23 Aug 2010, Andy Millar spake thusly:
> To put things in perspective, I make a "profit" within 12 months by
> changing from a HP DL140 G3 to a Dell R210.
>
> I suspect most of the power savings are from moving to the nehalem
> cpus and associated architecture, which seem to have much improved
> power management.

Agreed. I moved my home machines from a couple of always-on old
rattletraps (four rather old disks in an md RAID array, PIII and Athlon
4) to a single always-on Nehalem server (with S states enabled in the
BIOS, and four RAIDed GreenPower disks) and a Core i7 (-> Nehalem)
desktop that's suspended when not in use (but has S states disabled so
that Linux can rely on the TSC being constant frequency, as accurate
time measurement matters more for desktops and power conservation is not
so critical as it's off when idle for long periods).

I hoped this would save me some power, but my power bill fell by *three
quarters*, far more than I'd been expectin. Note that this is despite my
having the usual house stuff in the bill as well.
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