Calculator for server running costs

Haggisman · 7 Dec 2012 at 16:34

Hi guys,

I'm in the process of putting together a proposal to upgrade our ~15 8-9 year old servers (don't ask) to a couple of high spec servers running multiple VMs.

As part of this I want to compare the running costs, and just wondered if there's a calculator anywhere I can use to generate the required figures?

I know the power ratings of the PSUs, but iirc it's not as simple as just using that as obviously they aren't running at full load/efficiency 100% of the time!

I did stick the figures in here:

http://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Tools/serverpowerusage.php

Which gave me a cost of ~£17/day - does that seem realistic?

Otherwise, anyone got any gems of knowledge or links to calculators?

Cheers

bremen1874 · 7 Dec 2012 at 16:59

It's easy enough to work out.

A plugin power meter, or load information from a UPS, is the easiest way to find the load in Watts.

Divide the load Wattage by 1000 and then multiply it by the cost per unit and that'll give you the hourly cost.

£17 per day would be roughly 7 Kilowatts of load. With 15 servers that would be a load of about 470 Watts per server which is a credible figure.

Haggisman · 7 Dec 2012 at 18:08

bremen1874 said:
load information from a UPS, is the easiest way to find the load in Watts.

Derp. I should have thought of that...

bremen1874 said:
£17 per day would be roughly 7 Kilowatts of load. With 15 servers that would be a load of about 470 Watts per server which is a credible figure.

Yeah, they range from 300-800 watt rated PSUs so 470 is slap bang in the middle =P

So... by replacing with a couple of physical hosts running VMs on ~1100W PSUs I could potentially save the company £3-4k pa... spiffing XD

Cheers dude

HarryPainful · 7 Dec 2012 at 19:58

Don't forget AC cooling costs, UPS size, space, warranty upkeep etc.

It all adds up.

Haggisman · 9 Dec 2012 at 20:32

HarryPainful said:
Don't forget AC cooling costs, UPS size, space, warranty upkeep etc.

It all adds up.

Warranty? Lol... don't get me started on that - there's 1 server still under warranty, the rest expired in 2008 or before :rolleyes:

DRZ · 14 Dec 2012 at 15:56

If it helps you with the sums, a sample Dell R620 here is right at this second consuming 182W.

Spec is 2x E5-2630L 2.0GHz procs, 384GB RAM, 2x146GB 15k SAS disks. This is with a light-ish load although at full load it isn't much more.

A much busier R620 which doesn't have such efficient procs but has half the RAM and is under much more load is consuming 154W right now.