Re: Power supply efficiency on older model Sun equipment

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Andre van Eyssen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2008, D G Teed wrote:
>
>
>> computer hardware habits.  I plan to consolidate the duties of
>> a dual PIII and Ultra 1 into one Atom based file, email and web server.
>> The new system will have an 80plus rated power supply.
>> Hopefully it will run at under 40 watts.
>
> But will it have enough I/O capacity that you won't be grinding your teeth
> every time you have to copy a few DVD isos to/from the fileserver?

I have to wait too long for I/O on the Ultra 1, which I'm running with 10K
SCSI disks.  It is also slow serving up photo galleries made in igal
or cacti pages.  The PIII has PCI IDE controllers to boost disk to ATA100,
hdparm reports reads of 41 MB/sec on the mirror device, only 2-5 MB/sec
better reading from a single disk device.  I'll be putting SATA 2
drives in the Atom.

User reviews I'm seeing at egghead and other places
compare the Atom to a Celeron 1400Mhz with hyperthreading added in.

> Will the
> Atom boards on the market run a real operating system?

Yes I expect so, a guy in my LUG says he runs CentOS 5.2
with no problems.  Many people seem to be looking at them
for home theatre applications due to the low noise, small
form factor and cheap price.

> Will you trust the
> machine with non-ECC memory? Are you ready to put all your computing eggs in
> one basket with no RAS features?

My sparc machines are from old generation.  The processors have no
ECC on the cache, and Sun provided a patch in Solaris to make
up for this back in Solaris 8 or so.  I have a theory that the
absence of this scrubber in other OS is what makes Solaris
more robust than Linux or NetBSD on Ultra Sparc II generation
Sun boxes.  My PIII has non-ECC memory and is stable.
This is for home use, so the only redundancy I'll miss is
having another DNS server running when I need to do
maintainance.  I always run software mirrored RAID and this
has served me well.

> How long will it take you to break even on cost of hardware and effort to
> set things up?

The power bill rates are rising faster than my income where I live.
I suspect I can reduce 240 watts down to 50 @ 24x7.  Using
the calculator at the power company's website, that is a change
of $224/year to $47/year.  It should pay for itself in about 3 years
or less with rate increases.  In case you didn't know, the
Intel Atom and motherboard are about $70 for the package.
The processor itself draws 8 watts.  I wonder if there will
be blades made of stuff like this - maybe not the Atom but
maybe an Atom version 2.

> I know I could probably replace my V880 and Blade 1000 with a pair of loaded
> X2200s these days - I don't have many SPARC-only applications. I could
> probably flatten the entire load down to a single T2000, if I did. But it'd
> take over five years to break even on costs - longer than the basic
> lifecycle of the hardware.

We are talking about Suns at home, right?  My wife would freak if
I brought home a T2000.  They blend into the sound of a machine
room, but run one in a room by itself and they are loud.

I work at a poor Canadian University and our life cycle
on equipment is typically 7 years.  Last summer I took
the cyrus email system off an Ultra 2 running Solaris 6.
Our student system is still running on an Enterprise 250
with 2 300Mhz procs (due to migrate to a T2000) with
Solaris 7.

> That's the problem with replacing hardware to save power - unless you've got
> a *lot* of machines (eg, 24 x E250 was something that popped up in a recent
> study I conducted), it takes too long to break even. It's a lot cheaper if
> you count your time as 'free', but IMHO, most people doing power-reduction
> new hardware run at home are just looking for a quick way to justify buying
> some new toys. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't saving anything. And if
> one is purely worrying about the environment angle, that new low-power PC
> was probably made under manufacturing conditions far, far filthier than a 10
> year old Sun.

This was probably true of the first generation of power saving
systems, but I suspect the Atom and also
AMD's Athlon 64 2000+ are the first part of a wave
that is about to start a change in the computing landscape.
For server rooms, the cost recovery is doubled, because
if you are not making the heat, you also don't need to run as much A/C.

I'm not suggesting the mini systems now available are
up to the task, but the generation which is to follow may be.
But for my home use, the time is right to switch.

--Donald