Green Your Data Center with a Low Power Server, Intel Atom Powered – 25 watts

As power costs increase more people are looking at performance per watt. Virtualization of high power servers has been done by many. Another new approach gaining momentum is low power servers.  The Register reports on a 25 watt server for UK hosting company Bytemark.

Intel UMPC chip enters service as server CPU

Madness or genius?

By Tony Smith → More by this author

Published Monday 21st July 2008 12:32 GMT

UK hosting company Bytemark has seen the future of servers and it's... er... a processor designed for tiny laptops and desktops.

Yes, we're talking Intel's Atom, specifically the 1.6GHz 230, which Bytemark's now using as the basis for what it claimed were its lowest-cost dedicated Linux-running servers yet.

An Atom-based box with 2GB of memory and a pair of 100GB SATA drives costs £45 a month to rent, compared to £60 for a unit built around an AMD Athlon LE-1620, 1GB of Ram and a 100GB hard drive.

Bytemark's Atom-based box: lots of empty space

Bytemark charges less to set the system up, too: £50 for the Atom box, £100 for the Athlon. Both CPUs are single-core jobs.

Part of the reason for the lower cost is the power saving: the Atom system consumes 25W in total - a lot less than the Athlon rig does, Bytemark's Matthew Bloch claimed.

Intel is going to do everything it can to protect its high margin server business, so you’ll find these Intel Atom based servers coming from non-traditional markets.

I’ve been looking at building my own home server using http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342.  But, thanks to a friend who reminded Intel’s IDF is coming up in August, I am going to wait and see what he reports on at IDF.

Comments

[tinkthank]

Suggesting people adopt low power Atoms as mainstream servers is a horrible idea. A virtualized 8 way 45nm Xeon server is far more efficient. You can host 20-30 guests with the same horsepower as this Atom for under 300 watts. That's 10-15 watts per guest. In the real world if the sites aren't heavy on php or sql you could host 50+. Dedicated hosting on low power machines might be a profit center for hosting companies but is environmentally unsound. Worse, the power supply they're using in that system is probably 60% efficient at 25w, maybe less. And think of all the extra sheetmetal, power supplies, and systemboards that will end up in landfill as a result of not virtualizing.