X5650 Server Power Consumption?

[msg7086]

Hello! Having been around for a long time but this is my first post here.

I've got some old dual X5650 sitting in SM 1U servers running close to idle. I was a bit shocked when I was measuring the power consumption of those and seeing 200W+ each. Does that sound about right?

SM chassis + 1xPSU + 5xFan, an adaptec 4 port RAID card, 12x8G sticks and 4 ES.3 drives, that's about 220W. Room temperature is controlled at 73F.

Also I'm looking into replace those boxes by a multi-node box, e.g. the 6026TT 4 node series. How much difference would it be due to sharing the PSUs and fans? (We are looking to reuse all the CPU and memory so no E5 upgrades right now.)

Thank you.

 

[T_Minus]

Seems high unless those drives are using 10w each.

 

[msg7086]

Seems high unless those drives are using 10w each.

Measured the difference after pulling some drives, each uses 9.3w idle.

But still, without RAID card and hard drives it uses 180w-ish.

 

[PigLover]

What PSU is in the chassis? During the X5500/X5600 "era" SM shipped a lot of systems with inefficient PSUs. More recent systems from SM have Gold/Platinum or better. If you have an old PSU there could be a significant part of that idle load leaking out of the PSU as nothing more than heat.

 

[msg7086]

What PSU is in the chassis? During the X5500/X5600 "era" SM shipped a lot of systems with inefficient PSUs. More recent systems from SM have Gold/Platinum or better. If you have an old PSU there could be a significant part of that idle load leaking out of the PSU as nothing more than heat.

That's a good point. It's PWS-561-1H20, marked as 80 plus white.

 

[PigLover]

With that PSU you should be able to get power readings from IMPI. If you can you should see both the input power and output power read separately - and you can see exactly how much is wasted by the PSU (to the limits of accuracy of that the PSU sensors provide, of course).

 

[msg7086]

With that PSU you should be able to get power readings from IMPI. If you can you should see both the input power and output power read separately - and you can see exactly how much is wasted by the PSU (to the limits of accuracy of that the PSU sensors provide, of course).

PSU status shows me N/A in the IPMI. Guess it's because the boxes are not vanilla SM but customized somehow and thus some cables missing?

But anyway, do you have an idea how much power would it save if I switch to a 4 node server with the same CPU/Memory spec?

 

[BLinux]

this doesn't answer your question directly, but for reference, I recently got a dual L5640 system w/ 192GB of RAM (16GBx12), onboard SAS2002, and no drives, it idle at 140W. when I added 8x 4TB 7200RPM SATA drives, it went up to just under 200W.

 

[Evan]

Seems a little high but I know I posted some reference data for DL380 2u boxes a while back and they certainly can run idle over 200w with a few extras.

I think changing case etc is just spending money that's not worth it, either go new or live with the old as it is and put the $$ away towards the upgrade you will do in future.

Depending what the systems do although not cheap a new e5 v4 or even some higher end Xeon-D systems will perform better, more memory (not much more for Xeon-D) and idle less than 50w in that config. Power for me is $0.25 kWh so 200w down to 50w is huge in 24x7 operation, if just for testing now and then fire them up when needed.

 

[T_Minus]

That's only maybe a little high, as-in 10-20w higher than I'd expect from my testing of same CPU years ago. Which may be accounted for from the fans, power supply efficiency, voltage provided, etc...

 

[msg7086]

Thanks for all the information.

Did some more experiments and found out that sitting idle in BIOS uses 15w more than after booting up into the OS, so that matches what @T_Minus said.

Already ordered a 6026TT-BTRF as we need it anyway. Will measure the power consumption and decide whether we are gonna buy more of these to replace our old servers. I mean, they are pretty cheap, and if it makes 200w difference on 4 servers combined, the power bill saving for 1 year will cover the server cost.

 

[Evan]

Check my post for comparison usages in this thread at end of page 1
Building a Server: Is LGA1366 Still sweet spot today for Power Consumption vs Cost?

200w+ idle for sure.
Given a single e5 v4 will do the same work for less than 50w if carefully planned and with more performance and memory. (As will e3 or Xeon-D probably as well) I would only keep old stuff when it owes you nothing and does the job without changes required.

 

[msg7086]

Check my post for comparison usages in this thread at end of page 1
Building a Server: Is LGA1366 Still sweet spot today for Power Consumption vs Cost?

200w+ idle for sure.
Given a single e5 v4 will do the same work for less than 50w if carefully planned and with more performance and memory. (As will e3 or Xeon-D probably as well) I would only keep old stuff when it owes you nothing and does the job without changes required.

Thanks! Will read through.

Our needs are a bit different -- we prefer many servers with fairly large memory (32G+), mid-range CPU and low cost, so E5s wouldn't do the job due to the cost.

 

[BackupProphet]

LGA1366 is powerhungry. I recently shut down some servers her that I replaced with Dell R210 II, better performance, though less ram. But the difference was huge!

 

[Evan]

Not to make light of the comments but when anybody says the need fairly large memory that would for me translate to 256gb+ or more likely 512-768gb.

E5 v1/v2 is pretty cheap these days with all the end of lease stuff. V1 stuff on a 4-5 year lease is worth almost nothing and you will find plenty of dual E5-5670's with 256gb ram out there I am sure.

I mean simply do the calculation and at some point it's going to be a cross over between power costs and equipment investment costs.
Hard for me to judge as the places we have datacenters and systems are mostly high energy cost counties.

 

[msg7086]

Not to make light of the comments but when anybody says the need fairly large memory that would for me translate to 256gb+ or more likely 512-768gb.

E5 v1/v2 is pretty cheap these days with all the end of lease stuff. V1 stuff on a 4-5 year lease is worth almost nothing and you will find plenty of dual E5-5670's with 256gb ram out there I am sure.

I mean simply do the calculation and at some point it's going to be a cross over between power costs and equipment investment costs.
Hard for me to judge as the places we have datacenters and systems are mostly high energy cost counties.

We don't use that much though. They used to have 144-192gb per server, but since I just bought a new box, I'll re-distribute it and make it 96gb each.

We currently don't have the cash flow to support the upfront cost but when we have a good budget,
5037MR-H8TRF with 2660v2 looks pretty interesting.

 

[Evan]

Yep that SM server looks good at that price if you don't need a lot of I/O.
Have to look for large size memory dimms but if you need a few nodes that looks like a nice option.

If capital Budget in very very tight if it seems then the old stuff can still perform ok (X5670 up) is pretty powerful for sure, just that power usage is a killer.