I care about wattage! (Score 1)

Wattage/power is critically important to many hosters and people deploying solutions at datacenters these days. Let me give you an example.

Suppose you want to host a fictional colocation hosting company. You want to deploy a bunch of web servers. Now, let's say that you've got a 6x6 cage, 24 sq feet. Your colocation provider tells you that they can supply you with 100 watts per square foot of power and heat dissipation capability. From the information I have, this is a reasonable to high assumption. So, you figure you'll put in two racks (2'x3' each), each 42u high. Figure once you put in your power distribution, switches, etc, you're left with 32u of space in each rack. So, you figure you can deploy 1u servers in the remaining space. That's 64 servers! So you merrily deploy them until you remember wattage. So, you do the math. Each server is rated at 200 watts. Even assuming that your other equipment (network switch, etc.) doesn't take any wattage, you've got 3600 watts to play with. 3600 watts divided by 200 watts/server = 18 servers. Definitely not optimal.

So, what do you do? You try to reduce the wattage consumption/dissipation of the servers (remember, power in = heat dissipated). You want the wattage per server number down well below 100.

Thus, if you want to deploy a high density 1u server configuration in your datacenter, power consumption is going to be critically important to you. That is, unless the datacenter is built to pump in high amounts of electricity and pump out huge amounts of heat.