rack power question

Mon Mar 24 00:47:54 UTC 2008

> > Surly we should be asking exactly is driving the demand for
> > high density computing and in which market sectors and is
> > this actually the best technical solution to solve them
> > problem.  I don't care if IBM, HP etc etc want to keep
> > selling new shiny boxes each year because they are telling us
> > we need them - do we really? ...?
> 
> Perhaps not. But until projects like <http://www.lesswatts.org/>
> show some major success stories, people will keep demanding
> big blade servers.

Disagreed. Customers who don't run datacenters general don't understand
the issues around high density computing, and most enterprises I deal
with don't care about the cost. More and Faster is their vocabulary.

> If you move all the entreprise services onto virtual servers
> then you can free up space for colo/hosting services.

We do quite a bit of VMWare and Xen, both our own and our customers. We
have found power consumption still goes up, simply because there is
always a backlog of the need of resources. In other words, it's almost
"if you build it they will come" relates to CPU cycles as well. I have
never seen a decrease in customer power consumption when they have
virtualized. They still have more iron, with a lot more VM's.

> You can even still sell to bulk customers because few will
> complain that they have to deliver equipment to three
> dara centers, one two blocks west, and another three blocks
> north. X racks spread over 3 locations will work for everyone
> except people who need the physical proximity for clustering
> type applications.

Send me those customers, because I haven't seen them. Especially the
ones with lots of fiber channel and InfiniBand.