

Building an energy-efficient server - pingswept
http://pingswept.org/2009/09/13/building-a-green-server/

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bockris
8 cores with a single GB of RAM. Really?

If this is strictly a file server you can do a lot better than that energy
wise.

~~~
pingswept
(I built the server.)

You're right, in a sense-- a file server certainly would be better off energy-
wise with fewer cores.

But building a fileserver wasn't my sole intent. In the long run, I expect to
use all the cores, but with more RAM added. I just didn't want to buy RAM
before I needed it-- I can add more RAM without losing the RAM already there.
The same is not true for cores-- I can't add cores without throwing away the
old processors. I thought about just buying one processor to start with, but I
didn't want to worry about the availability of an identical second processor
down the road.

(Actually, now that I think of it, there's actually 2 GB of RAM in the machine
now. Post updated.)

~~~
bockris
I've been thinking about one of these.

<http://www.tonido.com/>

I don't know exactly what you are going to do but it might be better to serve
email/files from something like this and use your bigger server only when
needed. I guessing your eventual workload for bigger server will be
intermittent and in the off time you will be wasting tons of energy by running
a mostly idle computer.

Just my $.02

