I've got an r730xd with dual cpu's (14 cores each, 2.6ghz base, 3.5ghz turbo, 135w tdp each), 256gb of ram, and 14x16tb 3.5" drives, and some nvme in a pcie carrier card. It eats a lot of power (i know about 80 watts are the drives alone). I run about 11 vm's, 3 windows servers, 2 windows desktops, 6 linux/bsd vm's, and 10 LXC containers, with 1 LXC container hosting 30-40 docker containers. CPU is normally around 30%, but occasionally spikes higher. All home server hosting stuff.
I've been thinking about moving away from datacenter gear, and getting into mini pc's to save power, and either a DAS off one of the nodes or separate low power nas board. i was looking at PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks and my dual xeons combined have the same multi-core score as a single 13900h, and the single core is almost half of the 13900h. Yeah i'd lose ram and pcie lanes, but I would think a cluster of 3 nodes each with 96gb of ram would should work fine. As far as pcie lanes go, not really an issue since the ms01 has 10gb nics, 3 nvme slots, and a single pcie slot.
I was talking to a buddy who was insistent that i'd use just as much power as the 2016 xeon, because i'd be turbo'ing the 13900h all the time due to the fewer cores count, regardless of the passmark scores, and that i'm insane to consider not having ECC especially with my nas and using nextcloud for all my personal data and family photos (yes i have an offsite backup).
Now i did order a single minisform MS-01 to test it out, but i'm wondering for those of you who have gone down this path going from old iron to mini pcs, how did you see your power consumption change? My expectation is that going from 1 server to 3 mini pc's plus a nas, i'd wind up with similar total power utilization, but wind up with greater fault tolerance which would be worth it. My buddy is convinced my power utilization will go up significantly.
I've been thinking about moving away from datacenter gear, and getting into mini pc's to save power, and either a DAS off one of the nodes or separate low power nas board. i was looking at PassMark Software - CPU Benchmarks and my dual xeons combined have the same multi-core score as a single 13900h, and the single core is almost half of the 13900h. Yeah i'd lose ram and pcie lanes, but I would think a cluster of 3 nodes each with 96gb of ram would should work fine. As far as pcie lanes go, not really an issue since the ms01 has 10gb nics, 3 nvme slots, and a single pcie slot.
I was talking to a buddy who was insistent that i'd use just as much power as the 2016 xeon, because i'd be turbo'ing the 13900h all the time due to the fewer cores count, regardless of the passmark scores, and that i'm insane to consider not having ECC especially with my nas and using nextcloud for all my personal data and family photos (yes i have an offsite backup).
Now i did order a single minisform MS-01 to test it out, but i'm wondering for those of you who have gone down this path going from old iron to mini pcs, how did you see your power consumption change? My expectation is that going from 1 server to 3 mini pc's plus a nas, i'd wind up with similar total power utilization, but wind up with greater fault tolerance which would be worth it. My buddy is convinced my power utilization will go up significantly.
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