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hm. the price data would show it's not more efficient in terms of capital. $140K, right? before disk? for 1024GiB ram and 512 CPUs. with my current setup, I

by lsc 16y ago

hm. the price data would show it's not more efficient in terms of capital. $140K, right? before disk? for 1024GiB ram and 512 CPUs. with my current setup, I end up paying about $1900 for 32GiB ram and 8 (/much/ more powerful) CPUs before disk. So, I'd need 32 of those puppies, at a much more reasonable $60,800 - it would give me half as many CPUs, but, uh, from my experience a atom core is less than half a opteron core. how much power would that eat? in my setup, we'd be talking about 3840 watts, each one of those single socket 8 core boxes eats about one amp of 120v, give or take. they say 4w per server, so that'd be 2048 watts for their solution; so yeah, it will take quite a while to make up the price difference. Now there are some reasons why having your own physical server is better than having a virtual slice, but many of those reasons have to do with I/O, and as these boxes don't come with local storage... so at least for my workloads, they still can't beat the nice, standard opteron G34 systems I throw together in my workshop.

hga 16y ago
You can put up to 64 hard disks/SSDs in the front. If your power consumption figures are right, it would take 46 years to make up the difference at 10 cents/kW h. As I recall, you'd divide that by half for the cost of cooling, and then you'd have to figure in the lower capital costs of requiring 1/2 the cooling. Also possibly subtract some network hardware. The box provides "Up to 64 1 Gbps or 16 10 Gbps uplinks". And it may be more "server grade" than your setup, it integrates load balancing and server management; at the very least, the hotswap granularity is smaller. That still sounds off, except for companies that are running out of machine room space (the type of premium you pay for a laptop). How sure are you of your alternative's power consumption? I.e. have you hooked one up to a Kill-A-Watt meter? They claim 1/4 of the power of "today's best in class volume server". I think we're obsessing too much on the "$139,000" figure, if you look at http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 you'll see there are so many options (1 or 2 GB per CPU, Ethernet and storage cards, possibly/likely some cost for the optional hot swap disk physical infrastructure, etc.). To make a good comparison you'd need to figure out and price a system including load balancing and network hardware, measure it for real and contact SeaMicro to find out the real price for a comparable system from them. Plus until they work through their backlog they won't be too eager to discount....
- lsc 16y ago
  I can slot 4 disks in the front of my pizza boxes, too... I was just doing the calculation without disk because the blade was priced out without disk. my power figures are approximate, but real-world; This is what it says when you log in to the APC. also, unless you own the data centre, cooling costs are priced into power. 2x20a 120v circuts are the most I can get in one rack (they don't want too much power density, right?) that's 30a 120v usable, or 3600 watts, and it costs me about a grand a month. Being as you can easily slot more than 30 pizza boxes in a 44u rack, density doesn't matter, because even my lowest density solution can give me more power density than the co-lo cooling system can handle, so when I'm pricing things out, I simply count each watt as costing me around $0.28 per month. Which includes rackspace, but as I said, in the data centres available to me, the factor limiting density is the cooling system, not my equipment.

by lsc 16y ago

hga 16y ago

You can put up to 64 hard disks/SSDs in the front. If your power consumption figures are right, it would take 46 years to make up the difference at 10 cents/kW h. As I recall, you'd divide that by half for the cost of cooling, and then you'd have to figure in the lower capital costs of requiring 1/2 the cooling. Also possibly subtract some network hardware. The box provides "Up to 64 1 Gbps or 16 10 Gbps uplinks". And it may be more "server grade" than your setup, it integrates load balancing and server management; at the very least, the hotswap granularity is smaller. That still sounds off, except for companies that are running out of machine room space (the type of premium you pay for a laptop). How sure are you of your alternative's power consumption? I.e. have you hooked one up to a Kill-A-Watt meter? They claim 1/4 of the power of "today's best in class volume server". I think we're obsessing too much on the "$139,000" figure, if you look at http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 you'll see there are so many options (1 or 2 GB per CPU, Ethernet and storage cards, possibly/likely some cost for the optional hot swap disk physical infrastructure, etc.). To make a good comparison you'd need to figure out and price a system including load balancing and network hardware, measure it for real and contact SeaMicro to find out the real price for a comparable system from them. Plus until they work through their backlog they won't be too eager to discount....

lsc 16y ago
I can slot 4 disks in the front of my pizza boxes, too... I was just doing the calculation without disk because the blade was priced out without disk. my power figures are approximate, but real-world; This is what it says when you log in to the APC. also, unless you own the data centre, cooling costs are priced into power. 2x20a 120v circuts are the most I can get in one rack (they don't want too much power density, right?) that's 30a 120v usable, or 3600 watts, and it costs me about a grand a month. Being as you can easily slot more than 30 pizza boxes in a 44u rack, density doesn't matter, because even my lowest density solution can give me more power density than the co-lo cooling system can handle, so when I'm pricing things out, I simply count each watt as costing me around $0.28 per month. Which includes rackspace, but as I said, in the data centres available to me, the factor limiting density is the cooling system, not my equipment.