[kwlug-disc] [OT] linux server power

[Insurance Squared Inc.]

I'm finding this discussion interesting.

I wasn't aware unlimitel had a hosted solution.  I will investigate next 
week - maybe that gets rid of one computer and headache for me right 
there.  We've got two toll free lines and two phones, so not real heavy 
usage.  Just me and my wife at home acting like we're a real business.

Your calcs are similiar to what the electrician did.  But there's two 
computers there both with likely 500w power supplies with multiple Xeon 
cpu's per box, and a handful of scsi drives.  And a 24 port switch on 
the circuit as well that connects all the computes around the house.  So 
yeah, lots of power that I probably don't need there.

The phone box clearly needs no horsepower.  I didn't know that, I've 
just been careful about being underpowered so that I had good phones.

The webserver and backup, all that is is my website forces sales into a 
database here that I use.  And I've got a bunch of big drives that does 
daily backups (and archives) of my webserver and our desktops.

The only thing that needs horsepower is I zip the backups every day for 
archives, and that can take many hours since I zip up a complete 
snapshot of everything, every day.  But based on this discussion it 
sounds like if I can get rid of the phone system by outsourcing and I 
tweak my backup system, I can get away with one small system maybe with 
a big drive or two.  Or maybe I just run a VM in my desktop and get rid 
of the entire mess.




On 28/01/11 04:50 PM, Unsolicited wrote:
> On Fri, January 28, 2011 12:29 am, Rashkae wrote:
>    
>> On 11-01-27 08:08 PM, Insurance Squared Inc. wrote:
>>      
>>> OK, I slid the linux part in there :).
>>>        
> Not needed. The list is as much about 'K-W' and computers as much as it is
> about Linux, particularly as there is recognition that we live in a
> Windows world.
>
> Power, and its consumption, affects everything above.
>
>    
>>> My wife just brought in an electrician to tell us why our electricity
>>> costs at home are so high.  He came up with a bunch of different
>>> things, but one of the potential culprits are the two computers
>>> running in the basement.  One's an old Dell tower server that runs our
>>> Voip phones.  The other is a web/database/backup server running on an
>>> older HP workstation.
>>>
>>>        
>>      
>>> A quick back of the napkin estimate from the electrician indicated the
>>> two machines might be costing me 30+ bucks a month in hydro alone.
>>>        
>> Did this electrician use a simple Watt meter before making these napkin
>> calculations?   Unless these two computers have attached CRT's turned on
>> 24/7, I would be *really* surprised if combined these are using more
>> than 150W, (3.6 KWh / day, * 30 = 108KWh)  Still worth reducing, of
>> course, but that should cost less than half than this $30 estimate.
>>      
> Or whatever the doohickey attached to a VOM is that looks like a clamp
> from an operating room table, that tells you the power flowing through the
> wires via inductance?
>
>
> Check my math please. 500W = 1/2 kW @ $0.06/kWh ->  0.5 x $0.06 x 24 * 30 =
> $21.60 for a 500W power supply on a computer running full bore 24 x 7.
>
>      You can't be drawing more or your power supply would fall over, and
> you can't be drawing anywhere near 80% or it would reasonably quickly
> melt. In either case, ain't nothing happening here in those cases
> (it's dead, Jim). So call it $17.28.
>
>
> Leveraging off what John said, and what he's said in the past (which was
> based on his best guess and/or experience of the time), if your VoIP
> hardware is all external/IP, through ATAs and/or SPAs, then a VM should be
> OK. Further, being a vm, and since you are of course running two redundant
> failover systems in your home bet your business environment, you can
> snapshot the vm occasionally, so that if you're in the midst of a problem,
> you fire up the latent vm on the other machine. Arguably, this is true of
> your web server as well - especially if the non-static pages it's pulling
> are off another computer, such as that old laptop doing nothing any more.
> [I'd bet Khalid could speak to the viability of that, here - you might
> want to post how many lines and phones you're running on VoIP, and per day
> hits, simultaneous users, extent of dynamic content you're serving up on
> the web, to get more precise fuzzy suggestions here.)
>
> What's your tolerance for down time, and what's your service people
> proximity like? If they can have you going within 4 hours, do you even
> need a backup voip solution if merely being able to pick up the ringing
> phone is sufficient.
>
> Would an Unlimitel Virtual PBX suit you, and take the on-site hardware
> issue away entirely? Or a local hosting provider?
>
> If your needs are modest enough, Lori has demonstrated Asterisk on a
> LinkSys. And if not modest enough, only slightly bigger hardware would do
> it. Same may be true for a webserver, depending upon the amount of dynamic
> content, perhaps utilizing space coming off a USB drive.
>
> Re: SSD's ... is it not still current thinking that SSD's have a shorter
> lifespan than hard drives?
>
> And don't forget, if you have>  0.5 TB drives now, I don't believer there
> are may SSD's of that size out there, and certainly no SSD is reasonably
> priced, vis a vis hard drive, using capacity as your only yardstick.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>
>