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Re: [LUG] (head in the) Cloud computing

 

Andy Smith wrote:
> 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
>
>   
have you still got some of these servers left,alex the noob

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