Supermicro Microcloud - power consumption - is it worth?

[Yarik Dot]

Guys,

i am considering buying supermicro microcloud with E3 CPU in it. They claim, they have better power usage compared to 1U servers, but as I have measured, 1U systems have already quite low power consumption.

Has anyone (perhaps @T_Minus?) any of these units available? Would you mind to share (or even better to compare that with 1x1U) power consumption of these units? If you don't have 1U equivalent, just post your numbers about power consumption (idle/100%) and we can compare that. I have a table with some data.

My thoughts:

• - the microcloud is more expensive than 1U * systems
• - it has only 2 drives compared to 1U* which has 4
• - when it's backplain fails, you have a huge problem as you have 8 nodes down instead of 1
• + there are 2 PSUs availabe
• + it consumes only 3U in rackspace.
• ? better power efficiency

I am trying to establish, wheras it has economical sense to buy these units or just go with 1Us, which I use now.

* 1U - considering 1U (813MTQ), 4 drives, E3 Xeon, single PSU.

 

[Patrick]

At the data center now. No Microcloud but consolidated 3x 1U/ 2U dual E5 V4 servers to one 2U 4N chassis (need to do a bit more work before I can migrate the fourth).

Power consumption is about 9% lower than the three nodes with the same drives and add-on card in each node.

Shared cooling plus the ability to run PSUs in their peak efficiency ranges help a lot.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

I've got a fully populated MicroCloud (8 nodes w/E3v3, 4x8GB, 1xSSD, 1xHDD, 1x40G IB per node) system running at my house right now. At about 20% load, it's literally $100/month difference between having it on and having it off. I've given some very serious thought to selling it and buying a dual E5 setup which would suit my needs better and save my electric bill, but I've got about $8000 invested in that beastie, and it works.