Les Mikesell wrote: > On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:23 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >> >>>> a) You think I, or a *lot* of other folks, are going to do that at home? (Please - I'm trying to get my fiancee to at *least* go from *shudder* Vista to Win7) >>> >>> If you leave them on, add up the power cost of running an old box for years. >> >> Sorry, that doesn't work either: *everything* new seems to need a lot more power than the older stuff. Certainly, last time I upgraded my own system, I had to buy one that was 150% the power of the old one. > > That was probably before power became a big thing for servers - in most cases now power and cooling are the limiting factors for > expansion in a data center. Most of the new servers use 2.5" drives and while they might still use as much power per 1u of space due to using more blades in a chassis or having more CPUs and RAM, we get much more performance from the same space and power consumption. It's not such a big deal for desktops, but you can get small low power systems if you look around - or just use a laptop that will sleep when you close the lid. Heh. Many of the new servers we are getting are all on the order of 48 or 64 cores, and they eat and drink power. The same UPS that would handle six 4 or 8 core boxes can handle *three*, if we're lucky, when a clustering job's running.... mark