2022-02-03 Server Status Update

[Rockinsince87]

Total power consumption by the rack is now just over 10kW. That emits about 34k BTUs per hour.

With only five of the PE1950s turned on, the room quickly warmed up to 95F and their fans were screaming like hair dryers.

This forced me to install a CRAC unit (computer room air conditioner) at a cost of $7,500. It is mostly installed and it should be ready to run on Monday.

The 10kW rack with the 10kW CRAC will eat up about 14,400kW hours of electricity per month.
Electricity around here goes for about $.10 per kW hour, for a monthly electric bill that could exceed $1400 per month.

Dang. Yeah that's the problem with the PE1950s. They are very power hungry. We had a large number of IBM x260 servers, 7U and 4 power supplies each. I hated them. They consumed a monstrous amount of power. Standing behind those racks was brutal. After we upgraded those to newer servers after we finally migrated away from the solution running on them , we cut power consumption in half while gaining more than 10x the compute power at 1/4 the foot print.  

I would encourage slowly replacing the PE1950s at a rate your comfortable with over time. It should help with the power consumption long term. 

Nice call on the CRAC and it sounds like you got a decent deal actually.

The final rack server has a problem. The network interface is not working. They are sending a new NIC; that should arrive on Tuesday.

Things are coming together. It still looks possible to have this thing back online by the end of this month. That is my goal.

Awesome! Very exciting news!