We’re currently in the process of setting up a bunch of servers in the u.k. to deal with European traffic on the site.
Something I was surprised to find out last year was that the most limited commodity in London regarding hosting is not space or bandwidth, it’s power. One nameless ISP told me that it will remain this way until after the London 2012 Olympics as they’re sucking up all the excess capacity!
Our initial allotment is for only 4A. This really isn’t much when a single one of our dev machines (the ones we use to host internally, build things on and test on etc.) draws around 0.9A. Out initial estimate for servers was for a base install of 6 so these machines aren’t really going to work.
Those guys at Dell are producing some more efficient boxes these days which means our primary web stack can run in just 0.5A (Single Quad-core Xeons). Our main db server is likely to be at least 1A so we needed something even more efficient than the dells for the network config.
At home I’ve built a number of machines as media servers or lightweight web machines using the Mini-ITX format. I was therefore quite excited to hear about a bundle being offered by mini-itx.com which included a dual-core Atom based ITX Mainboard, a couple of gigs of RAM, all housed in a 1U Rack Case.
Inside the Atom 1U Rackserver (aeryn)
As you can see we have an ITX board, 2 SATA drives (80Gb mirrored) and not much else in the box. Witbh this config we have a power draw of around 0.31A. Not quite as low as the 0.15A advertised by MiniITX but we have gone for the dual core atom + 2 drives so not surprising it’s higher.
We also experimented with a 2Gb flash drive in place of once of the HDD to see if it would bring down the power. It didn’t that much so we went with the slightly more robust full RAID1 mirror instead. This seems to be the way things are going though so hopefully we’ll be able to move all of the infrastructure type servers to full SSD in the medium term.
2Gb SATA Drive (Flash)