Shoop, our local PeakOil advocate, has written an interesting piece on how he is doing his part on being more eco-friendly.
What caught my attention was his intention to replace his Dell server with Mac minis. I’m sure Bernard (of Ultimate Business Machine fame) will cheer on this.
I am curious how many servers is he replacing and what do those servers run? If it is something that is cross platform, have a comparison been done with SUN’s new CoolThreads server?
SUN do has a datacentre simulator that allows one to test the impact of your server choice. I am interested to find out, if one new CoolThread server will be more cost effective and energy efficient than multiple Mac minis.
Alternatively, if you have multiple server, won’t it be possible to ‘consolidate’ it and virtualise it into partitions using stuffs like Virtuozzo etc? So, instead of adding new servers, one could just slice another partition out.
I use the second approach. All my servers are in the datacentre, however, all of them are also Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Granted, my key concern is not about energy efficiency but cost efficiency.