Current AEON profitability

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Greg DePasse

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Dec 19, 2017
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I have a pretty large amount of colo in someone else's facility. Hoping to leverage mining to justify stepping up to starting my own in 2018. Mining is a pretty "forgiving client" when it comes to working out any kinks along the way.

Evap cooling works great in Arizona. A single-tenant facility might be able to get by with evap-only if they're careful about how they run the facility and they use appropriate servers (i.e. no 1u heatsinks).
<<snipped>>
The payoff is that you can probably achieve a PUE in the ballpark of 1.2 or less if you go through the effort. And, the servers themselves should use 10% less power due to using more efficient 2U / 2-node models. Server fan power doesn't count in PUE calculations but it is an important factor. Overall it shouldn't be hard to get your total costs to under half of what it costs to colo, provided you have sufficient scale to justify the fixed overhead and setup costs.

Facebook does this in New Mexico. The form factor of opencompute is not a coincidence -- it provides sufficient height and width for efficient heatsink design, with 2x 2-CPU servers in one chassis.
This reminds me of EBay's Project Mercury in Phoenix from 5 years ago:
https://gigaom.com/2012/04/06/making-the-web-more-efficient-a-thousand-servers-at-a-time/
FTA:
"Project Mercury gets free cooling year round, even in the heat of summer. On Aug. 23, 2011 — a 119-degree day — one of eBay’s Dell units had a partial-PUE score 0f 1.044 while drawing 520 kilowatts of power. On January 17, 2012, while drawing 1 megawatt, the same unit had consistent partial PUE of 1.018 while the rest of the data center was doing between 1.26 and 1.35. Project Mercury has room for 11 modular data center units on its roof, and every one drives down the PUE of the entire facility’s PUE. Nelson realistically expects an entire facility PUE of less than 1.2."
 
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ehorn

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Jun 21, 2012
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2x30a 208v. Breaker panel is in the room so that helps : )

I assumed it would be 240v but it measured to 208v after install.
Makes sense... L6-30R/P is more common as well... 100 bucks in materials for 2 circuits into my office...

42U rack... 20 chassis, 2 switches, 2 vertical pdus to split the load...

160Kh/s per rack... hmmm.... 4-6 months ROI?

Now to deal with cooling and sound deadening... And the wife...
 
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funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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Makes sense... L6-30R/P is more common as well... 100 bucks in materials for 2 circuits into my office...

42U rack... 20 chassis, 2 switches, 2 vertical pdus to split the load...

160Kh/s per rack... hmmm.... 4-6 months ROI?

Now to deal with cooling and sound deadening... And the wife...
Here I thought I had those things under control at home -- two windows open with the wire rack of servers in between. Box fan blowing air out the window on the "hot aisle" side. Box fan blowing air in on the "cold aisle" side. After adding latest batch of servers, this is clearly insufficient. At least, if I want to be in the room. "Cold" side runs 10+F above outdoor temps, "Hot" side can get to more than 20+F above outdoor temps. Fine and dandy when it's 50-60 at night. Not so great when it hit 77 degrees today. It's within tolerance for the servers (although the fans run faster), but it's no fun being in the room.

Going to upgrade to some delta screamers.
 
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Klee

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Jun 2, 2016
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Makes sense... L6-30R/P is more common as well... 100 bucks in materials for 2 circuits into my office...

42U rack... 20 chassis, 2 switches, 2 vertical pdus to split the load...

160Kh/s per rack... hmmm.... 4-6 months ROI?

Now to deal with cooling and sound deadening... And the wife...
I have a BIG advantage, I have a ex-wife not a wife I also have not had a steady girlfriend for a couple of years..............I do what I want, how I want and when I want.

I have been eying that 240V 50 amp outlet in the back bathroom thats for the dryer......LOL
 

funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
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I have a BIG advantage, I have a ex-wife not a wife I also have not had a steady girlfriend for a couple of years..............I do what I want, how I want and when I want.

I have been eying that 240V 50 amp outlet in the back bathroom thats for the dryer......LOL
Awesome = D

Oh, btw, the delta screamers worked just fine (so far). Will report back more when it makes it through the warmer part of a day.
 
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Joel

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Jan 30, 2015
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It's snowing where I am, so no worries about temps. On the downside, the power keeps flickering just long enough to reset my machines. Fun times. :)
 
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pyro_

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Oct 4, 2013
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And that is why they created USPs, so the power flickering does not reset them
 

Joel

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Sure, but the $50 specials won't work when you're pulling 1300w from the wall.
 

garetjax

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Nov 26, 2017
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Heh nope. I was building my first mining rig, and had it temporarily plugged into the same UPS as my gaming rig, was adding Vega cards, and kept getting crashes and hearing a buzzing, im like WTF. I shut off the power supplies on the mining rig, still buzzing wtf. Then realized it was the UPS buzzing because it was overloaded.
 

jims2321

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Jul 7, 2013
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I have a BIG advantage, I have a ex-wife not a wife I also have not had a steady girlfriend for a couple of years..............I do what I want, how I want and when I want.

I have been eying that 240V 50 amp outlet in the back bathroom thats for the dryer......LOL
Got the contractor coming in the end of the month to energize my sub panel my basement. I have him installing 2 240v/30A circuits for my servers. Trying to convince my employer to allow employees to have used cabinets/ups/switches for cost of hauling them off (they pay a third party vendor about $25/item to haul them for junk).
 

funkywizard

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New tax law, you get 100% depreciation in the year of purchase... write it off!
Yes, there are various ways to do that for capital expenses. For us buying them, this applies. At least two ways to do it:

1) Section 179 deduction. Subject to certain limitations, can write off 6-figures worth of capital purchases in year one each year

2) $2500 "per-thing" safe harbor exemption. Provided you follow certain accounting steps, you can declare that yoir company's minimum threshhold for depreciation is $2500. I.E. anything under $2500 is treated like an expense. Applies to "a whole thing" -- i.e. one server and all parts inside of it cost < $2500 combined? You can expense it. The chassis cost $1000, CPUs $2000, ram $2000, hard drives $2000? Sorry, that's a $7000 server, you have to depreciate it (or use section 179), you can't expense it.

If the item is considered inventory for resale (like with the server liquidators), this doesn't apply. Hence they wanted to get these sold before year end for tax purposes.
 
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Joel

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Yes, there are various ways to do that for capital expenses. For us buying them, this applies. At least two ways to do it:

1) Section 179 deduction. Subject to certain limitations, can write off 6-figures worth of capital purchases in year one each year

2) $2500 "per-thing" safe harbor exemption. Provided you follow certain accounting steps, you can declare that yoir company's minimum threshhold for depreciation is $2500. I.E. anything under $2500 is treated like an expense. Applies to "a whole thing" -- i.e. one server and all parts inside of it cost < $2500 combined? You can expense it. The chassis cost $1000, CPUs $2000, ram $2000, hard drives $2000? Sorry, that's a $7000 server, you have to depreciate it (or use section 179), you can't expense it.

If the item is considered inventory for resale (like with the server liquidators), this doesn't apply. Hence they wanted to get these sold before year end for tax purposes.
Well sure, but I'm talking about ROI, not the tax deduction. Deduction is the icing, and will almost offset my $15K IRA conversion. :)