Datacenter Power. It seems you can never have enough.

We have our colocation inside an Equinix IBX. It is an excellent facility. Unfortunately, about 2 years ago, our cage got a new neighbor. They have added rack after rack of new servers to accommodate their ever increasing traffic. Which means they have effectively used up all the allocated power feeds for our section of the colo.
So as we started to fill our own cabinets, we found that we were quickly using up the 2 x 20A 110V feeds they had allocated to each of our cabinets. Our partner in colocation, sell.com was also at this time upgrading their farm to the latest dual xeon models. These boxes were pulling a LOT more amps than the previous P3 generation.

Very quickly, we became experts on how much amperage we could squeeze out of our existing feeds and what systems required how much power.

Here are some anecdotal amperage readings we took from our fancy amp reading tool.

Dell PowerEdge 2850

Specs: Dual Xeon 3.6GHz/1MB; 6 x 73 GB SCSI Hard Drive (10K RPM); Dual Power supplies

• PS A & B both active
  • PS A – 1.15A
  • PS A & B – 2.35A
• PS A only – 2.30A

Dell PowerEdge 1750

Specs: Dual Xeon 3.2GHz – 4GB RAM; 3 x 146 GB 10K rpm SCSI Hard Drives; Dual Power supplies
Software: Debian 5.0 – MySQL 5.0 – InnoDB heavy

• Off – 0.21A
• Cold Start – 3.00A Peak
• Nominal usage – 1.90A

Dell PowerEdge 1650

Specs: Dual PIII 1.4Ghz; 2GB RAM; 3 x 36GB SCSI 10K rpm; Dual 275W Power supplies

• PS A & B both active
  • PS A – 0.7A
  • PS A & B
    • Nominal operation – 1.41A
    • Warm Boot – 1.44A Peak
    • Cold Boot (drives spinning up) – 1.56A
• PS A only
  • Nominal operation – 1.37A

Apple Power Mac G4

Specs: G4/533 Dual – 1.5GB RAM – 2 x 18GB SCSI (15K rpm)

• Peak Startup – 1.27A
• Max load on SCSI drives – big copy operation – 1.18A

Apple Xserve G4

Specs: Dual 1.0 Ghz G4, 2GB RAM 2×60GB & 2 x 180GB

• heavy cpu/disk load – 1.52A
  • simultaneous diskutil zero on all disks (booted from CD)
  • Max CPU – multiple threads of cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null & ssh/rsa keygen operations
• all 4 disks idle – 1.37A
• Insert 180GB ADM – peak 1.41A, settled back down to 1.32A
• Insert second 180GB ADM – peak 1.48A, settled down to 1.38A
• keygen and cat large data file generated by /dev/urandom, copied to Software RAID mirror 60GB – spikes to 1.56A

Apple Xserve G5

Specs: Dual 2.0Ghz G5, 3GB RAM, 3 x 80GB SATA

• Nominal operation – 1.8A
• Max Cold Boot – 2.16A

Specs: Dual 2.3Ghz G5, 1GB RAM, 2 x 500GB SATA

• Nominal operation – 1.8A
• Max Cold Boot – 2.07A

Apple dual Quad Core Intel Xserve

Specs: Dual Intel 2.8Ghz Quad Xeon (8 cores), 16GB RAM, 3 x 1TB SATA in RAID 5

• Max Cold Boot – 3.23A
• Nominal operation – 2.80A
• Max cpu, disk activity – 3.68A
• Powered Off – 0.27A

Apple single Quad Core Intel Xserve (Xserve2,1 – Early 2008 model)

Specs: Single Intel 2.8Ghz Quad Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2 x 250GB SATA

• Nominal operation – 2.00
• Powered Off – 0.28A
• Max cpu, disk activity – 2.08 amps
  (calculated by adding all “watts” readings in Server Monitor and div by 115V)

Apple Intel Mac Mini

Specs: Intel 1.66Ghz Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 60GB E-Rated Hitachi drive E7K100 model

• Nominal operation – 0.29A
• Max cpu, disk activity – 0.37A

Apple G4 Mac Mini

Specs: 1.33Ghz PowerPC G4, 1GB RAM, no wireless, 32GB Transcend Solid State Disk

• Nominal operation – 0.20A
• Max cpu, disk activity – 0.26A

Apple Xserve RAID (Xraid)

Specs: 7 x 250GB (Hitachi) and 7 x 750GB (Seagate 7200.10)

• Nominal operation – fluctuates around 2.00A
• Max disk activity (as much as I could generate using Xserve G4) – 2.19A

IBM 4000R

Specs: Dual 833Mhz PIII – Single Power supply – 2 x 18GB SCSI (10K rpm)

• Cold Boot (drives spinning up) – 1.0A
• heavy cpu/disk load – multiple instances of cpuburn and cat’ing /dev/urandom to a file – 0.9A
• Nominal operation – 0.75A max

IBM eServer x330

Specs: Two Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 864MHz processors, 1GB RAM, Single Power Supply, Single 36GB SCSI drive

• Connecting Power Peak: 0.29A
• Stdby Steady: 0.11A
• Power On Peak: 0.78A
• SCSI spinup: 0.98A
• Powered low load: 0.63A
• Loaded (6.0+ Load Average with disk): 0.80A
• Disk activity only: 0.72 peakA
• Reasonable Load + Disk Activity: 0.79A
• heavy cpu/disk load – multiple instances of cpuburn and cat’ing /dev/urandom to a file – 0.82A

IBM eServer x336

Specs: Dual 3.0Ghz Xeon, 4GB RAM, Dual 575W Power Supplies, Dual 146GB SCSI drives

• Connecting Power Peak: 1.06A
• Stdby Steady: 0.79A
• Power On Peak: 2.5A
• Powered low load: 2.12A
• Loaded (7.0+ with disk): 3.25A
• Disk activity only: 2.40A
• Reasonable Load + Disk Activity: 2.85A peak
• heavy cpu/disk load – multiple instances of cpuburn and cat’ing /dev/urandom to a file – 3.2A

Some pieces of network equipment/drives I’ve tested:

• Cisco CSS 11151 Load Balancing switch – 0.89A
• Cisco CSS 11501 Load Balancer – peak startup: 0.69A – idle: 0.63A
• Cisco 2621 Router – peak startup: 0.14A – idle: 0.13A
• Cisco WS-3548-XL 48 port 10/100 switch – peak startup: 0.87A – idle (no ports connected): 0.61A
• Cisco WS-C2924-XL-EN 24 port 10/100 switch – peak startup: 0.39A – idle (1 port connected): 0.36A
• Cisco 1538M (8 port 10/100 hub) – 0.16A
• Cisco 1601 T1 Router – 0.08A (nothing connected)
• ——-
• Dell PowerConnect 5224 24 port GigE switch – peak startup: 0.43A – idle (no ports connected): 0.36A
• Dell PowerConnect 3248 48 port 10/100 switch – peak startup: 0.40A – idle (no ports connected): 0.35A
• Dell PowerConnect 3324 24 port 10/100 switch – peak startup: 0.22A – 8 ports connected: 0.2A
• ——-
• HP ProCurve 2848 (J4904A) – 48 port GigE switch – peak startup 0.69A – idle (no ports connected): ~0.51A
• NetGear FS524 24 port 10/100 switch – peak startup: 0.24A – idle (no ports connected): 0.21A
• ——-
• Juniper NetScreen 5GT – 0.06A
• NetScreen 10 – 0.06A
• Netopia 3386-ENT – 0.05A
• Adtran CSU/DSU – 0.01A
• BayTech DS2-RPC – 0.05A
• ——-
• 500GB Seagate SATA drive – Spinup: 0.31A – Duplicate large files – 0.11

Dave from NetApp has some interesting things to say about power in the datacenter.