[rescue] Apple Announces Rackmount Server - WITH IDEHARDWARE RAID

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 16 May 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> Yeah, but wouldn't the power bills add up extremely fast when talking about
> a project of that size?

No.  Your average x86 box pulls in the neighborhood of 200W.  10000 of
them together pull about 2MW.  Even with California electricity gouging
that's only $300/hr.  I'm quite sure that their bandwidth budget breaks
this by more than an order of magnitude.

Cooling adds more, sure, that's about a 550 ton heating load.  Decent
water based chillers have an EER of around 14, COP of 4-5, so about
another half-megawatt to run.

For a comparison, imagine other ways to solve the Google problem.  You
need huge quantities of any type of server to handle their query volume.
Imagine just the support contract costs on, say, a dozen Starcats.  They
would be far from able to handle the query volume with the same degree of
competency, you would pay more for upkeep, and a failure (though far
rarer) would affect you far more significantly.

-James