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Power Usage

N

NickOlsen8390

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 24, 2009
Messages
126
Greetings All.

Were in the process of building a small server room and are trying to calculate our cooling needs.

What do you guys feel would be a good number wattage wise for a "Normal" server.
Let's call this server a dual processor 2u, With two hard drives.

I'm thinking about 150w idle and 400w Load?

We are going to have a total of 8 42u cabinets. I was going to calculate my numbers based on 8 total 42u racks full of 2u servers at load not idle (It'll never be that full). And then taking that number x1.5 just to get a good idea of what were looking at.

Any input is appreciated.
 
Greatly depends on the chips you use, both generation and clocking. 400W load might be typical for servers a few years ago, but the newer SB/IB and BD chips all have much much better power saving features. My dual E5-2620 (6 core @ 2.0GHz) is about 110 idle and 200 load, I'd imagine a dual E5-2687W (8 core @ 3.1 GHz) would be a few W higher idle and almost double that at load.

If you're filling up over 300U worth of rack space I figure you should have some room in your budget for a few test systems and a Kill-A-Watt. Any general experience we might have probably won't save you near as much money as building two competing test servers to see exactly what you might want to expect your real load to be.

As far as the 50% extra capacity that sounds all nifty on paper but you have to ask yourself just how vital this server room is to your business. If the compressor blows completely in the middle of june and it takes a day to get the new unit there and installed is the cost to the business more than the cost of the AC unit? If so you should look at 100+% extra capacity in the form of a redundant AC unit.

When your boss asks "Why 50% extra?" "Well I thought just in case worst case isn't REALLY worst and maybe a bit of expansion room if necessary" doesn't sound nearly as good as when he asks "Why 100% extra" and you answer "If one unit goes down our servers don't fry". Easier to sell loss prevention than possible maybe expansion and also sounded good in my head.
 
That is a very good point. Redundancy is always better.
I actually calculated my numbers based on 300 watts per server.
While most of the machines will indeed be newer. Were just trying to get a general idea. The actual servers will be everything from 1u atom's to 6u blade chassis. Which is why I'm being more then generous with my numbers. And testing a machine or two isn't really an option.

Not to mention. It wont be full for a very long time. Possibly never.
Thanks for the input
 
if it were me (and ive just done this .....) i would do the following:

1) UPS - APC Symmetra PX UPS, these are modular and can be expanded as and when you need additional capacity with no additional cost on the base system, at max 48 KW chassis is the same price as a 96KW, you the add power modules as you need them.

2) Cooling, split your load across multiple units and then have an additional one of the same spec giving you N+1. Say you require 25KW cooling, install 3 * 10KW units to give you your every day cooling, then have a 4th 10KW unit ready to kick in should there be a fault
 
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