PeteHopton

A Good rule of thumb is that 1W left on is £1 per year. So if you've got 100W, on all the time £100 per year, if you've only got it on half the time then it's £50 per year. this works out at about 11p per KWh.

You need to look to contain and separate your hot and cold air, then use some extraction on the hot air, something a bit more 'industrial' than bathroom extractors! This will create a negative pressure in the room, now all you need in venting to get fresh air in the front of your servers. Important you block up the gaps in your cabinets.

At 3.2KW, you could easily fresh air cool that data room most days of the year. So why not put in some substantial ventilation and use the A/C as the backup?

Why not buy some near line SAS (seagate constellation ES) they aren't much more than SATA these days and you get the SAS command set.

If it were me, I'd save the VMWare money and get a hefty HA SAN setup, Starwind do a HA software SAN you can load onto servers or buy with hardware. I'd then use HyperV with an Enterprise edition server license, which will deliver all the enterprise functionality of HyperV, then buy in a few of the right system centre licenses and you've got a full suite of tools in an easy to manage environment (no consoles or command lines). A couple of hosts with some 2x12 core AMD opterons and a good load of RAM and these should handle most things you can throw at it, including a host failure.

Intel boards like RAM in certain configurations these days, think triple channel, a bit of RTFM and you can find out how it likes its RAM sticks.

I would suggest the biggest thing is the Virtual machine images, if you are using the laptop to test updates to server images and test server based changes before implementation then I'd suggest this is a good enough reason by itself.

Some Interesting Marketing by Stone, although I've seen people get far more that 5% off a Stone quote just by telling them "we're going with someone else."

OK, there is an easy way to achieve this, but it's not that cheap. Starwind HA Enterprise Edition will do this very fast and very reliably from a Windows based OS, I've been using it for years and can vouch for it. iSCSI SAN Software and Storage Virtualization Solutions They might do you an education discount.

I would suggest a vendor agnostic guide looking at different technologies, compatibilities and methods of achieving things. I have previously written a guide on SANs primarily looking at performance vs energy savings benefits for different tiered storage elements which was presented as JISC conferences, so I might be able to use some of this to help start things off. I see all over this forum 'xxx is good' but good for what, every technology has it's place and pro's and con's, things it should be used with, most products can be filed by 'technology' (actually a lot are rebranded boxes made in taiwan by a different, sometimes unheard of vendor).

Here are some tips: Go with cheaper 'near line SAS' disks, but a significant amount of read cache (32gb or so), this will save a lot of money and increase capacity and performance. You only really need the high rpm disks for intense database access. Get a unit that supports double parity RAID (raid 6) as there are problems running RAID 5 on large arrays. Make sure the machine has a good amount of battery backed write cache to overcome the write penalties associated with parity based RAiD. Get a unit you can manage easily, there are even windows based units on the market with starwind software which enables some nifty features, including high availability clustering. These are really easy to manage. Make sure you get some advanced redundancy features, redundant power, fans, nics, remember that if this unit fails, everything stops working (unless you get a high availability cluster). Consider the virtualisation support of the SAN, you might want to do some hyperV clustering or VMware in the future.

Liquid cooling can cool a lot more than air-conditioning, but with all of these things it's about specifying the equipment correctly, otherwise you will just be wasting your time, money and pushing up the energy bill. So how many watts or BTU have you get total? and how big is the room?

If anyone is interested, best bet is to contact one of VeryPCs resellers like @Millgate or drop VeryPC a line by the website and they will work with you to find a reseller.

Backups Are really important things, the last thing you want to happen is a few random read failures on restore and the backup fail. My tips are this: Use enterprise grade HDD only. The rate of read failure is usually one order of magnitude lower and the RAID command set will allow recovery of bad sectors 'on the fly' reallocating spare sectors and rebuilding the data from the RAID set. Low cost high capacity disks include RE4 from WD and Constellation from Seagate. Use a decent RAID card with a battery backup unit. Why? lets say you server fails due to a power and UPS failure. Was the disk based backup forced off too? if so, and it was writing data without a BBU, then the RAID can become punctured and your array will fail on restoring the server. Use a double parity RAID on all arrays greater than a couple of TB. RAID 6 can save your data, these days, a non-recoverable read error is actually quite a common occurrence, every 100 TB or so read and there will be a NR read error. Let's say your backup is 10 TB usable and in RAID 5, a single disk fails, The RAID card now has to computer through about 14 TB of read data to rebuild the array, one non recoverable read error and the operation fails. Do you fancy your chances 14%?

I am an AMD Fan, but the AMD desktop offering is nowhere near that of the Intel. AMD servers based on the 6100 chips are awesome value for money. This year you only want to get sandy bridge i3 i5 or i7, or if you're strapped for cash there are some new 'g-series' sandy bridge pentiums. Forget about discrete graphics, the new GPU on die will do everything you will want it to. Spec with 4 or even 8 gb of RAM, as it's cheap right now. Spec in a 'hybrid' HDD, effectively a normal 320gb HDD with 4 gb of SLC SSD cache in front of it. Depending on where you are based in the UK, additional funding may be available from the carbon trust or local authorities if you pick an energy saving model - have a look for the energy saving trusts 'energy saving reccommended'.

That is still pretty high, just not insane. Check the other half of the Raid mirror, the way Linux software RAID works means one disk is worse off. At that rate the disk will kill itself in 2-3years with the unit continuously on. There are other problems with 'caviar green' disks in raid or multiple disk configurations, a vulnerability to vibrations and an issue with how the drive reports a read error or bad sector to the RAID, which would be a recoverable operation from an RE disk but not a caviar green.

Hi Bruce, Knowing UPS technology, as long as they are good enough quality the inverter will have protective circuitry that will turn it off after the input voltage drops below a certain level. So this is safe to do in my personal opinion.

Don't use Caviar Green Drives in Linux based devices! There is a conflict between the head parking 'green' feature 'intellipark' and the way in which linux runs RAID, it means your heads will park and unpark every 8 seconds and wear out very quickly. Use RE4 disks or Seagate Constellation ES disk. If you get a windows based server with these disks in, Starwind do a virtual tape drive software that will work with all your existing and legacy backup systems.

Good to see some shouts for VeryPC on this thread - thanks guy's, I appreciate the endorsement and will continue to invent cool stuff! @RTFM the new BLD's are like battle tanks aren't they! The steel it about 4 time thicker than normal Chinese chassis, designed for schools that need them to take a beating. Did you know the steel is from Rotherham, and the chassis is made in Hull? I don't like it when we make heavy stuff abroad, it's no cheaper it just drags the quality down and increases CO2 emissions. In relation to cost, VeryPC do try to make it so the products make up any difference in cost pretty quick on energy use, the latest ultra small machines are running (up to a) i7 Quad Core Desktop processors, 8GB RAM and Hybrid (SDD/Magnetic) HDD for 16W idle, with a mean consumption in use of 20W or so. At this rate you should see any cost difference evaporate in the first 18 months - and you can run them for a good 5 years (that's the warranty). My latest energy reporting software is almost ready to roll, which will have all the machines squarking to a simple web server their power use for putting together pretty looking reports. This will be available for machines already in the field (and other peoples machines) but will need calibrating. I'll be blogging about this software soon and I will let anyone who want the beta get it for £0.

There was some stuff on 'Fake Power Cords and Cables' the other day on a BBC program. Most of these will fail a PAT test.

Hi Guys, Letting you know. There has been a growing problem with cheap and fake supplies coming out of China, which can cause excess energy consumption and potentially even safety problems. EU regulations (known as EuP) state that a computer in off mode sold after 2010 should consume less than 1.7W in standby/OFF mode (with wake on LAN enabled). Although this is hard to measure, a cheap power meter should provide you with an idea if the computer is 'out of the ball park' PlugIn Mains Power and Energy Monitor : Power and Energy Monitors : Maplin One big issue has been with unsafe 'universal' or 'replacement' Laptop power bricks, if you have a power brick, check that it states the manufacturer, model number and bears the CE mark. Many of these fakes just display CE, voiding the 'manufacturer' of any responsibility. Check the brick has some weight to it, the cheap fakes feel really light. Often these fake parts also contain materials banned from import into the EU for safety reasons under the RoHS directive.

How many Watts of server gear have you got and how many SqM is the server room? Also how new is your server kit? Seriously, I'll figure out if Fresh air cooling is practical/achievable and if not give you a solid case to take back to the builders. With Fresh Air Cooling, you won't actually need any of the above.

Hi Dos_Box, Calculating CO2 emissions is quite easy, you just get KWh and multiply by 0.544. I think I agree with their PC power calculator, but I don't quite get the 'Virtual desktop comparison' one, it appears to leave out some factors. For example, the latest BroadLeaf Energy Efficient Core i7 Desktop idles at 16W and has an average consumption of 20W, compare in a thin client and most of the time these use 15W or so. Theory would suggest the thin Client is better right now right? Wrong. However, the servers required to run the Virtual Desktops haven't been considered here, which will have a considerable power consumption of several hundred Watts, and support maybe 50 respectable simultaneous multimedia users. This server will be in a server room, running 24/7, which will likely mean it's air conditioned (think double your power consumption here unless you've done some air containment in your server room). This server isn't running the 2000 hours per year + power policy time (power policy time is the time taken for your power management policy to kick in), it's running 8760 hours per year, about 4 times as much. In addition there will be the fact that Thin clients can't generally be power managed as effectively as PC's and the Thin client's power policy time is likely much more. I also don't advocate turning old computers into thin clients; it might seam like an admirable thing to do but it means your thin client is going to be using 50W when on, 46W in 'sleep' and probably 6W when off. Actually recycling these old machines is so good these days not much is going to see a landfill, manufacturing and embedded CO2 in a new PC or thin client stars from about 100KG and the money saved by the school in electricity would far outweigh the cost of a cheap thin client. In order to be legal in the EU, modern computers and thin clients need to consume less than 1.7W in off state, there is no limit on 'sleep' right now. A typical energy efficient PC would use less than 3W on sleep.

VeryPC have some software similar to the Microsoft stuff, but with the added benefit that it reports back to the server allowing you to collect information, it's not on general release yet but I'd be happy to subscribe anyone to the beta program, just drop me a message. Like the MS program it does need calibration, we undertook a number of tests to figure out the best power meters to recommend to customers. Various power meters were purchased and their readings in a variety of different scenarios compared to our expensive Lab power meter by Hameg, which is used for energy star testing and has accuracy of around 0.5% The best power meters we found were these, which were available from maplin, PlugIn Mains Power and Energy Monitor : Power and Energy Monitors : Maplin We found them to be +-5% off the Hameg when we then purchased a batch of them for our Quality control rig. These meters also have a KWh feature, which might be handy for plugging in and forgetting for a week to then read the result and multiplying by the number of computers and the number of school weeks in a year. Hope this Helps!

Hi Fox, I had an idea which was to provide a storage system with a low upfront cost and to remove the costs of maintenance of proprietary systems, by replacing them with standard gear and a familiar operating environment. I signed an agreement with MS and Starwind software. On November 9th one of my organisations, VeryPC, launched a load of low cost, Microsoft based iSCSI storage and HA SAN products on the Microsoft Stand at Green IT Expo 2010, EcoVault. Depending on what you features need, it should be about 1/2 the price of the Sun equivilent. Here's the press release: VeryPC launches a range of new EcoVault Storage Solutions becoming the first StarWind OEM partner : News from techmesh I'm not going to do a sales piece on an open forum, its bad form, and as we don't sell directly to end users - its inappropriate. But if this is of interest to you, please feel free to get in touch with the VeryPC team, one of the VeryPC resellers or come and say hi at BETT. ;-)