[CentOS] Old HP Xeon server blade with only SCSI HDD ports & CentOS

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Tue Apr 15 15:22:04 UTC 2014


On 04/14/2014 11:58 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> So has anyone done a cost analysis on the point where it is an overall 
> win to replace those old power hogs even if they still work if you 
> consider several years of savings on power/AC/space/time and maybe the 
> possibility of replacing at least 4 old clunkers with VMs on a single 
> new box? 
Yes, I have.

A 1950 fully loaded with 2x SAS drives will pull about 350W or so, max.  
After applying a max 1.4 PUE (our PUE, of course, varies with the 
season) that gives about $275 per year per box.  Since the 1950's were 
donated to us as NOS, and they are quite capable machines for basically 
any workload we have other than what the Altix boxen would do (say what 
you want; 30 1.5GHz IA-64's with optimized code and 54GB of RAM will 
crunch numbers quite well, and costs only 30 cents per hour to run (we 
don't run it 24x7, but only as needed and in the winter, when it helps 
heat things)), it isn't cost-effective for us to replace them at the 
moment.  The EMC Clariions that they're connected to take far more power 
than that, running around 3KVA per rack ($2,500 or so per year per 
rack).  But that cost would be there with a beefier virtualization box, 
too.  In our particular case, the power cost for storage swamps out the 
power costs for the servers.

I'm looking at putting oVirt on a few of the 1950's and pulling things 
from VMware on the 6950's over to them, and retire the 6950's, which 
have run continuously for the last 7 years.

We're a 501(c)(3) and I'd be glad to take your donation of something 
better, of course. :-)




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