What do you do with 18 servers, containing 22 power supplies, 26 processors, 31 gb of memory, and 51 disk drives, consuming over 14,000 watts of power?

Replace it all with one SUN 4200.  Thats what my company did and we couldn't be happier. Using VMware and virtual machines running all the same applications, Operating systems, licensed third party stuff we did before.

Oh but the new 4200 has integrated lights out management, so remote support is much easier.  And we can fall over the virtual machines to other 4100s if this one fails.  Our data center is 17 degrees cooler and our UPS uptime is now extended over 30% - we avoided buying a new airconditiong system and new UPS - saving over $180,000.

The money, heat, and power savings are allowing us to add more servers, nice cool 4100 and 4200s, to add compute power. The end of the blow-dryers we installed from the Gigahertz-wars of the late 90s and early naughts (20-00s).

We used Platespin to automate creating the virtual machines - it went like clockwork.  The virtual machine images themselves are stored on a Lefthand Networks iSCSI SAN cluster, which is also used for file storage by the virtual machines themselves.  The funny thing is, much of the data didn't move, it was already on the SAN. 

All our back office functions are now on virtual machines - not taking up power, creating heat when they are not in use.  Performance is higher than before.  Some of the servers replaced were dual core Xeons- some admittedly older PIIIs.


My developers, who chew up servers like skittles, love centralized workstations in VMs on the servers too - they can work from home, from a park, they can collaborate several folks for a few minutes on the same VM (they don't like working together for more than a few minutes....).  Our multi-city development is doing great.  Centralization is now hip, even with the "I want big iron on my desk" crowd.  The large number of servers it takes to support older versions of our applications in the field - virtualized.  Its eco-friendly and they spin up in seconds - much faster than a cold boot.

The hardest part of the whole project?  Finding out what to do with the other 50% of the SUN 4100 - its running well below 50% capacity.
 
Congrats to SUN and AMD - you have really changed things.  I can only imagine with the cost of gas and oil shooting up, and the cost of power in developing countries like india and china (and yes, thats where the majority of servers are going to be installed in the next 20 years, IMHO...) that the compute-power-per-watt of these new machines is going to really change things.  Its amazing how much cooler these servers run.

Don't take my word for it - try one for free - free server from SUN (with free Oracle. Double WOW)
I was never a big fan of centralization, coming up as a developer.
But my budget forced me to try it.  And there is no doubt its the way to go.

oh , and a quick calculation on that 14,000 watts of power.  Thats 14kw, x24 hours yields 336 Kw per day, times 365 days a year, roughly 122k (kw) or 122Mw, and at a retail price of roughly $40 (updated) a Mwhour - $4,800 a year in power savings alone.  Actual power savings are about 3x that since you need to power the UPS which is a lossy and heat creating device, and also the air conditioner (we just calculated the power used by the power supplies here - removing that heat takes more than 1x the energy to create it, typically 3-4x...).

So a measly SUN 4200 is saving us roughly $12k a year in power, half that if you have a cheap rate on your power next year - - but the blackouts in houston this week portel and expensive, hot summer, not cheap power....

For technical details, check my IT wizards blog entry