What's the wattage on 4 servers used for a business database?

Question

I have a non-existant company that uses 4 servers as their business database (payroll, inventory etc) what is the wattage on 4 servers like this? I don't know what kind of servers its for a project I am doing.. thanks.

Answer 1

Impossible to say, since we don't know what type of server that is, how many Power Supplies it has and/or what are their ratings. They may SAY 4 different servers, but it COULD be a single physical machine, or up to 4 separate machines... There's just TOO MANY combinations to guess. And it also depends on how much load there is on a server. Fully loaded server that's constantly running and thrashing the HDs will use a lot more power a mostly idle server.

While a server would normally use less juice than a desktop as it has no power-hungry video accelerators and no sound cards, it does require many fans for cooling and quite a bit of juice to power lots of HD's... IF it has RAID instead of a large HD. So there's no such thing as a "normal server" either.

I'm afraid it's just not possible to answer your question. Just for giggles, I'll throw out a number... 150 KW per hour per server.

For your reference, Dell claims their PowerEdge 850 eats between 107 and 252 KW per hour.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/environ/PE_850.pdf

Clearly, it'll differ depending on the exact model.