[Suns-at-Home] Power usage was Sparcs for pickup in Columbus OH

[Bob Hoekstra]

I don't know why, but I feel compelled to defend myself a little (or 
should that be justify).

No, the V880 does nothing for my carbon footprint. However, since I got 
it, I have powered down 2 hungry HP PA-RISC boxes, 2 small SGI boxes and 
2 Sun Ultra 5s. Soon a 3rd U5 will be powered down. Everything that 
those machines did is now being performed by the V880 running Solaris 10 
with about 6 zones. On the green aspect, I suspect that on the whole my 
total power consumption has gone down slightly. Further advantages are 
easier administration, improved throughput and a huge simplification in 
the cabling of my "data centre" (actually the back end of the garage). 
The fact that I have the ethernet RSC port configured as the console 
means I never need to bring my laptop (or myself) to the garage - a 
blessing in the winter or when the car is in there. Total CPU 
utilisation has increased, but I still have plenty of reserves.

So what is left powered on? From ADSL modem to a small hub, to a pair of 
old Dell boxes (600MHz Celeron) that act as an OpenBSD firewall cluster, 
to the main switch connecting the V880, the U5 still running for a 
while, a monitoring PC (Debian GNU/Linux), my desktop PC (also Debian, 
with W2K running under VMWare) and a wi-fi thingy that talks to my 
laptop. That's my current network.

I got the V880 of ebay at a very good price (£1,200 for 4 X 750MHz 
UltraSPARC III + 16GB memory + 12 32GB disks). In a brief moment of 
madness I considered a fully stocked E10K instead (only another £200), 
but then sanity returned when realised that I could not afford to run 
it. Now that would really have blown any green credential I might lay 
claim to :-)

Cody Swanson wrote:
> We recently decommissioned a perfectly working 32 way SGI Origin 2000 
> machine with 32gb ram because the power/cooling wasn't worth it when 
> compared to a new cluster of quad core linux machines that consume a 
> similar amount of power but do many times the workload.
>
> Julie Baumler wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Cody Swanson wrote:
>>
>>> I can't imaging the V880 is power efficient. We have a bunch of them 
>>> at work and they're beasts.
>>
>> We figured out at a previous job that if we bought a newer more 
>> energy efficent system we'd be saving money within 2 years.  That was 
>> before "go green" energy saving systems came around.  Sadly, the 
>> money for computers came out of a whole different divisions budget as 
>> the money for data center power and we couldn't convince the later 
>> folks to fork over some money.  I should have brought it up at a 
>> public board meeting....
>>
>> Juli
>>
>
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