[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[JF Mezei]

On 12-10-01 03:19, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:

> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/10/27/facebook-goes-global-with-data-center-in-sweden/


Yep:
##
Facebook to use outside air to cool the tens of thousands of servers
that will occupy the new campus
##


Woopty doo, so their cooling costs will be lower. But they still have
tens of thousands of servers, a number large enough they still need to
locate near a very large power generation facility.

All these "green" data centre stories focus on reducing the cooling
costs. They never discuss the actual server power costs and of course
never compare having tens of thousands of servers versus having X
mainframes with comparable compute/IO power.




Perhaps the millenium generation has never heard of mainframe computers
that can run linux and really think the only way to scale things is to
just had thousnads more PCs in your data centre.

You'll note that established mature companies who are not flush with
cash like the millenium companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple,
Twitter etc) do not run out and build data centres with 10,000 PCs.

If there were a truly objective "green" study comparing power costs to
run mainframes against equivaent number of 1U servers (equicalent in
computer/IO power), what would it show ?