rack power question

Sun Mar 23 17:37:28 UTC 2008

At 2:14 PM -0300 3/23/08, Ray Burkholder wrote:
>My desktop has a 680 Watt power supply, but according to a meter I once
>connected, it is only running at 350 to 400 Watts.  So if a server has a
>980W power supply, does the rack power need to be designed to handle
>multiples of such a beast, even though the server may not come close
>(because it may not be fully loaded with drives or whatever)?  Wouldn't it
>be better to do actual measurements to see the real draw might be?

Yes, if you perform the measurements both at peak cpu load
and during power-up (quite a bit of well-known gear maxes
out its power draw only during the power-on sequence).

Also, you're still going to want to size the power drop so that
the measured load won't exceed 80% capacity due to code.

/John