3 ms·

10W definitely matters on servers. You can easily have a dozen of these in 1U. 120W isn’t nothing to dissipate. I wonder what node this controller is made on.

10W definitely matters on servers. You can easily have a dozen of these in 1U. 120W isn’t nothing to dissipate. I wonder what node this controller is made on. If it’s made on TSMC N7 then they could cut power consumption roughly in half by going to N5P. The package size makes me wonder if it’s an even older node however.

dogma1138 5y ago
It’s not an issue in servers really, look at how much power high end NIC consume heck 10GBE SFP+ modules can consumer 5W> each and you can easily have 48> of those in a switch...
- dylan604 5y ago
  But a switch doesn't include a hairdrier, er, GPU generating heat within the enclosure. Server cases have potentially multiple GPUs, CPUs, plus now these 10W controller chips
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    You are correct. Some switches could do with much better cooling. A POE switch or one that is putting 10gb down a cat 6 cable is very toasty though. I’ve got one that is borderline too hot to touch. Thanks Ubiquiti.
    - touisteur 5y ago
      Oh you don't want your hand near a Mellanox connectx 6 then. 200GbE doesn't come cold...
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Most switches don't allow 5W pull in every port, those levels are usually only found in 10G copper SFPs which can't reach full distance due to power requirements so typically pull max allowed (or higher) levels. Typical 10G SFP+ SR or Twinax will consume about a watt per module. The ASIC may be a couple hundred watts under load. Servers typically have much higher power density unless you're talking 400G switches compared to low end servers.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  It's absolutely an issue in servers. Within the past month, I have worked with two massive global banks that are backpedaling on adoption of NVMe at scale due to power draw concerns. They ran the numbers, and the performance benefits of NVMe in most use cases don't justify the costs of retrofitting their data centers to handle the increased power draw associated with NVMe (2-3x per disk compared to SAS SSD). Granted, this is a somewhat self inflicted problem: the banks' data centers were built on the assumption that power-hungry storage platforms would always be isolated to a relatively small footprint, but they are adopting hyperconverged storage architecture as their new operating standard for the future. Newer data centers sized for the increased power draw associated with hyperconverged/converged infrastructure don't tend to have this problem.
  - btown 5y ago
    Curious - what's the general rationale for hyperconverged storage at a bank across the entire footprint? I'd imagine that data storage systems would need to have highly restricted APIs and strong persistence requirements, so you'd naturally tier your services as you would between an application/service layer and a database layer, as would be common for web applications. Certainly the database layer would benefit from converged infra, but wouldn't it be overkill to provide that to nodes running application & service code that shouldn't be doing much, if any, persistence to local drives?
    - sithadmin 5y ago
      There's a few factors at play. The first is that the % of apps at a global bank that follow a sensible modern design pattern is often surprisingly small; these are gargantuan, risk-averse (and hence change-averse) organizations that are just now barely wrapping their head around the idea of modern application infrastructure for core business needs. So each bank tends to have absolutely, stupidly enormous legacy app footprints. Next, there's the VDI factor - these banks are nearly entirely reliant on VDI for most employees. Most work cannot be done without connecting to a Citrix or Horizon session. As a random I/O-heavy workload, VDI benefits greatly from the hyperconverged infrastructure model in terms of cost efficacy. Also, these banks never pay anywhere close to list price to license any of their software, so the incremental cost of spinning up a cluster to support apps with relatively meagre storage requirements is often close to negligible, which is a strong advantage over the operational costs associated with setting up dedicated storage appliances.

dogma1138 5y ago

It’s not an issue in servers really, look at how much power high end NIC consume heck 10GBE SFP+ modules can consumer 5W> each and you can easily have 48> of those in a switch...

dylan604 5y ago
But a switch doesn't include a hairdrier, er, GPU generating heat within the enclosure. Server cases have potentially multiple GPUs, CPUs, plus now these 10W controller chips
- lostlogin 5y ago
  You are correct. Some switches could do with much better cooling. A POE switch or one that is putting 10gb down a cat 6 cable is very toasty though. I’ve got one that is borderline too hot to touch. Thanks Ubiquiti.
  - touisteur 5y ago
    Oh you don't want your hand near a Mellanox connectx 6 then. 200GbE doesn't come cold...
zamadatix 5y ago
Most switches don't allow 5W pull in every port, those levels are usually only found in 10G copper SFPs which can't reach full distance due to power requirements so typically pull max allowed (or higher) levels. Typical 10G SFP+ SR or Twinax will consume about a watt per module. The ASIC may be a couple hundred watts under load. Servers typically have much higher power density unless you're talking 400G switches compared to low end servers.
sithadmin 5y ago
It's absolutely an issue in servers. Within the past month, I have worked with two massive global banks that are backpedaling on adoption of NVMe at scale due to power draw concerns. They ran the numbers, and the performance benefits of NVMe in most use cases don't justify the costs of retrofitting their data centers to handle the increased power draw associated with NVMe (2-3x per disk compared to SAS SSD). Granted, this is a somewhat self inflicted problem: the banks' data centers were built on the assumption that power-hungry storage platforms would always be isolated to a relatively small footprint, but they are adopting hyperconverged storage architecture as their new operating standard for the future. Newer data centers sized for the increased power draw associated with hyperconverged/converged infrastructure don't tend to have this problem.
- btown 5y ago
  Curious - what's the general rationale for hyperconverged storage at a bank across the entire footprint? I'd imagine that data storage systems would need to have highly restricted APIs and strong persistence requirements, so you'd naturally tier your services as you would between an application/service layer and a database layer, as would be common for web applications. Certainly the database layer would benefit from converged infra, but wouldn't it be overkill to provide that to nodes running application & service code that shouldn't be doing much, if any, persistence to local drives?
  - sithadmin 5y ago
    There's a few factors at play. The first is that the % of apps at a global bank that follow a sensible modern design pattern is often surprisingly small; these are gargantuan, risk-averse (and hence change-averse) organizations that are just now barely wrapping their head around the idea of modern application infrastructure for core business needs. So each bank tends to have absolutely, stupidly enormous legacy app footprints. Next, there's the VDI factor - these banks are nearly entirely reliant on VDI for most employees. Most work cannot be done without connecting to a Citrix or Horizon session. As a random I/O-heavy workload, VDI benefits greatly from the hyperconverged infrastructure model in terms of cost efficacy. Also, these banks never pay anywhere close to list price to license any of their software, so the incremental cost of spinning up a cluster to support apps with relatively meagre storage requirements is often close to negligible, which is a strong advantage over the operational costs associated with setting up dedicated storage appliances.