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Uptime Institute Says Power to Cost 300-2250% More Than Server Hardware; What Does This Mean?

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:31:00 -0400

I came across Uptime Institute founder Ken Brill's CIO Magazine article via 3tera VP Marketing Bert Armijo's blog.

Ken says while hardware prices are falling, total cost of data center ownership is headed through the roof. 5 years from now, the purchase price for a rack of servers will drop 27.5% from $138K today to just $103K. But while it only takes 15 kilowatts to power that rack right now, the energy requirement will rise to 22 - 170 kilowatts by 2012. It could cost as much as $2.3 million to power/cool $103K worth of gear throughout its 3-year lifespan.

(I'm not sure if this figure includes switches and routers and such. A recent Cisco/APC/Emerson study shows that servers/storage/cooling consume 76% of data center power, with 11% going to networking equipment, 3% lighting, and 10% power conversion losses. If Uptime's calculations didn't take the other 24% into account, Ken's $2.3M becomes over $3M!)

I've been thinking about Ken's stats and trying to understand what they mean. As a point of reference, I was looking at Dell's website, which advertises the 4U PowerEdge 6950 dual core, dual processor Opteron server for about $9K. Is Ken saying that:

(a) This particular machine will cost 27.5% less 5 years from now?

(b) 2012's late model machines will sell for 27.5% less than what's on the market today?

(c) The amount of server hardware that fills up 4U of space will be available for $6500 in 2012?

If we assume he means (c), and we accept Sun's claim that "server performance, power and space efficiencies are improving at up to 40% annually on average, and could double every 2 years", then 4U of space may be able to accommodate not one but 4 servers that each feature 4x more processing power and 4x greater energy efficiency.

In other words, $6,500 could buy you 16x more computing resources than that dual Opteron! If that's the case, you might even be able to afford $1M per rack per year in electricity. But only if you virtualize like crazy. No more leasing data center space per square foot or per rack. No more dedicated servers, either. The average customer won't need 4x more processing power in 5 years, which means you won't be able to justify turning on a whole entire server just for them.

You'd also have to replace hardware early and often. Sun recently announced a refresh service for swapping out your servers at least 3 times over 42 months. At first I thought that sounded wasteful, but if server power efficiency is improving at 40% per year, holding on to old gear might end up costing you more. Again, virtualization would be a must. You wouldn't want customer apps to become attached to machines that will be phased out before long.

Bert from 3tera says changes in data center economics will make it increasingly difficult for enterprise CIOs to justify operating their own facilities. But they won't outsource to traditional colo or dedicated server providers. Instead, he agrees with Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman that in the near-ish future, you'll be "paying for data center horsepower the same way you pay for electricity or gas". I think so too. How about you?

PS - On a somewhat related note, eWeek says Intel will release its "Clovertown" chips today. The quad core processors have a 50 watt thermal envelope, versus 80-120 watts on earlier models. That's a 38-60% drop.

PPS - Also, speaking of the Uptime Institute, check out this SearchDataCenter.com interview on how they've helped The Planet save $10K/month on electricity. The Planet, the article says, is looking to expand beyond Texas into the Midwest.

Unmetered and Unlimited Space and Bandwidth

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:31:27 +0000

Microsoft IIS to overtake Apache?

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:50:09 +0000

Upgrade To APACHE 2.0 Web Server

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST
This quick tutorial will show you how to upgrade your existing Apache installation to the latest version (2.2.0 as the time of writing this tutorial).

Go to Hostican.com

Wouldn't It Be Great If There Were a ModernBill/StatCounter Mashup?

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:57:00 -0400

Over the past decade, I've bought and sold many millions worth of online ads. When I ran ISPcheck, I had no real answer for prospective advertisers who wanted to know what results my customers were able to achieve. And when I became responsible for RackShack/EV1's ad buys, I found that there was no easy way to measure ROI.

All I wanted to know at the time was how many visitors from TopHosts versus TheWHIR signed up. But as I've subsequently learned from Ted Smith at Peer 1, I should have been tracking customers throughout their lifecycle. If my cost per sale from Site A is 20% less than Site B, but the average account gets canceled 50% sooner, B would be a better long term investment.

A couple of weeks ago I convinced Ben Gabler at HostNine to install StatCounter, the better to look up new customers and find out where they came from, and which parts of HostNine's website they visited before deciding to sign up. (I've also used Clicktracks and Google Analytics, which provide aggregated data on visitor behavior, but don't allow you to drill down to each visitor's click path.) It just occur to me that it'd be very cool if this functionality were built into ModernBill.

Imagine being able to generate sales reports that tabulate order amounts against referring sources? Or pinpoint content on your site that's most-viewed by your most profitable new customers? Better yet, what if you could instantly compute the lifetime ROI from those $20 Google Adwords bids? Wouldn't you like to know if customers who clicked on your "cPanel hosting" ad stick around 3x longer than those who came through "cheap hosting"?

HostNine already gives all of its resellers free ModernBill licenses, and being able to automate signup/provisioning is awesome. But what if every $19.95 hosting plan came with a business intelligence system that delivers up-to-the-minute knowledge on what website copy and ad venues work? Wouldn't that be something?

AND, what if ModernBill could collect and publish aggregate, industry-wide data on how profitable TopHost-referred customers are, relative to those who came through TheWHIR? Having been on both sides of the table, I think that would really help both ad salespeople and media buyers.

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