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 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

Apple 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

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 PowerSupplies, 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

Cisco 11151 Load Balancing switch - 0.89A

Cisco 3548XL Switch - 0.32A

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

Posted by Brian Blood in Colocation, Routers and Firewalls, Servers