Hello Jacob, I might be missing something, but is anything stopping you from consolidating your servers onto a single HP / Dell that you already have? Or are these all at different customer sites? Depending on your power and processor usage, you might actually find that a single HP / Dell uses the same or less power than several 'low power' 1RU servers, with the advantage that you don't have to buy any more gear.
I read your post to take it that all these boxes are at a single site, rather than multiple, off site locations. Otherwise, Intel has just released a new low power Xeon, which is rated for just 45w if I recall correctly (dual core). Your OEM of choice will no doubt have some systems configured with these new processors. Kind regards, Timothy. On 28/03/2008, Jacob Yocom-Piatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > have a number of rackmount machines of various sorts in service at the > moment and, based on the relatively low load on them, am interested in > finding equipment that is more optimal from the environmental / > consumption point of view. > > machines that are currently in use are a smattering of dell, hp, sun and > via c3 / c7 rigs. it is hard not to notice the substantial noise, power > draw and heat that comes from the dell and hp rackmount systems and i > would like to see if better rackmount server choices exist that satisfy > the following criteria: > > - fast disks with hardware raid, i.e. u320 or sas, that are > hotswappable; am willing to accept SATAII if other criteria work > - non-i386 architecture; expect amd64 is the next best for cost > - decent processor speed and single core; these will be mailservers, > webservers, asterisk servers, etc, that aren't sufficiently loaded to > make processor speed a serious performance bottleneck > - low power draw / heat signature > - low noise > - 1U or 2U size > > the via c3 / c7 systems definitely do the trick for simple stuff like > firewalls that don't require quick or redundant disks. my experience > also indicates that you can certainly fully load the processor of a via > c3 system and lag it pretty badly. > > i look forward to suggestions :) > > cheers, > jake
