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Hi Tom, On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 03:02:34PM +0100, Tom Potts wrote: > On Wednesday 01 April 2009 10:42, Simon Waters wrote: > ... > > Of course no one is doing this commercially with old 386 boxes because > > they deliver an order of magnitude less computing per watt, and about > > four orders of magnitude less computing power per unit volume. And from > > a management perspective it makes sense for them to limit the variety of > > hardware. But I dare say if you have Carbon footprint to burn these > > technologies could be made to run on older hardware. > You have to have a lot of money to burn to throw away usable PC's in an > attempt to improve your carbon footprint! We're not talking server farm here > we're talking client farm! Not at all. More than two thirds of my company's recurring hosting fees are power related (or cooling, which is just another aspect of power) and this is only going to get worse. Replacing the rubbish default power supplies in 6 servers with new high efficiency ones costing less than £30 each saved the company over £120 per month, 3 months ago. Also late last year (in another role) we did a fork lift upgrade of a server farm where by removing the current servers we were able to replace them with newer versions packing twice the performance in the same physical space and actually using less power. The servers we removed were very usable in and of themselves: dual CPU dual core Xeons, 8G RAM, several 73G SCSI disks each. We found new uses for many of them, sold a bunch more back to the supplier (HP) in part exchange, some went to staff and other interested parties. There are still a few that we will have to pay an IT removals firm to take away and dispose of properly, and it still makes financial sense. It doesn't make sense for every situation, but it does a lot of the time. I would much rather have two decent modern machines running 3 virtual machines each, than have 6 older ones. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
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