On 22 Apr 2001, at 16:01, kg7fu wrote:
> Just an informal poll.....
>
> Do you use any sort of power saving scheme, from apmd to bios and/or
> screen savers, etc., on any servers?
>
> If so, what have you learned to avoid or implement to make them work
> effectively?
>
> If not, why?
My servers all have good UPSes set up to shut the servers down
gracefully after a specified time of no power. No APM at all. My
servers all have to be available 24/7, except for when backup is
happening, and they need fast response in case of emergencies.
But then my servers support the power plant, emergency
maintenance, and the folks that deal with chemical and radiation
accidents at the university.
You could probably use some sort of power management software
in some businessesses, if you had lots of control over powersaving
schedules, but it might not be as cost-effective as you might want,
at least in a small office environment, as servers really don't use as
much electricity as say, monitors or printers. On a big network,
this might be different, especially if you were doing something like
redundant web servers with load balancing, and you wanted to put
some of your boxes in standby during slow access periods.
But then again, the best power management scheme I've seen for
*really* big server farms is an S/390 mainframe running linux virtual
machines. 1 S/390 costs $750K and can be the equivalent of
roughly 40000 pentium servers. 1 mainframe uses considerably
less power than 40K pentium servers-- especially when you take
the cost of cooling into account.
Cheers,
Dennis
"Custard pies are a sort of esperanto: a universal language."
--Noel Godin
