I wanted to buy a tiny, energy efficient server, but I opted for a fast, powerful one. Next one will be energy efficient just like my next car. The combination of fast and powerful but energy efficient always comes at a premium. Its why celebrities drive electric cars.

I ordered this interesting device that allows you to measure the amount of electricity in watts that a device is pulling at any particular point. The device itself is cheap and plugs in between the device and its power source. THis is not the exact device I own, but its the exact same thing

Here are some interesting facts:

• The Samsung LNT4665F 46" 1080p LCD HDTValone 67w
• TV with macbook pro 270 watt
• TV with macbook pro but mac screen closed 250w
• macbook pro 85w
• mac book pro screen 20watt?
• TV with wii 130w
• TV with wii playing game 170w
• tortoise lights 250w
• tortoise heat pad 130w
• tortoise heat low 600w, med 924w, high 1460w
• living room heater same
• Dell 1950 server with 2 dual core 5160 3.0Ghz 120w-700w depending on usage Usually it is on the really low side.
• Dell 1950iii server with 2 quad core X5460 3.0Ghz 120w-700w depending on usage
• mac mini server 85W with a single 2.0ghz quad core i7

We use so much electricity and our bill is around $180-200/month for 3 people. For example jan-feb of this year we used 1577 kWh and it cost us $188.36 with services and taxes, etc. Looking at the bill I think it is somewhere around $0.12 per kilowatt hour. Which is 1 hour worth of 1000 watts.

I think we could probably save so much money by unplugging things that are not being used. One way to save a lot of money is to plug everything into power strips and then just turn those off when you leave. This is especially useful for devices that draw power when not in use, which is most of them.

So I leaned how ebay works today. I haven't used it in a long time. I was looking at new servers and the price was $1300 with 1 hour to go.

There was a "make an offer" button. I put in $899 and hit the button. I was under the assumption it sent an email to the auctioneer and they could get back to me. Instead it sent an immediate accept response with the bill. If I had known it worked this way, so automated, I would have tried lower. Still it is a great deal.

A new Dell 1950 III , Intel Xeon E5450 2x 3.0GHz Quad Core, with 16GB RAM and dual 1TB drives. The new drives are only 7200RPM vs the old ones which were 15K. I am curious if the tradeoff in size is worth the speed. It has 4 slots compared to the 2 on the old system, so many I will invest in a small OS SSD to fast boot.

I might have been able to built one from scratch for cheaper, like I did with the original super micro server, but it would not have been as sure to work as the Dell 1950 which I am already using.

Anyhow, this will allow to me to experiment with KVM and cents 6 virtualization.

This should also solve the running out of space for the site media. Not necessary but if anyone feels they want to contribute feel free to donate

Now if only I could afford SSDs for it

Earlier this year we bought four of the Intel SSDs to prototype them in a new Dell 1950 Poweredge Server in a RAID-0 configuration (striped data for pure performance). We have a multi-tiered slave database architecture so I’m not worried about RAID-level redundancy. The results were amazing! We tasked the Intel SSD prototype server as a database slave in our production environment to safely introduce the new technology into our operations. When we initiated synchronization from the master database server, the SSD server was about 90 minutes behind the master. Typically, when a slave is this far behind the master it would have taken a slave server about 30 minutes to re-sync. Well, with the usage of SSDs, it only took about 100 seconds to re-synchronize with the master database!

The freezing didn't kill them after all.

There go all the flowers.

The are so high res that thy blur out the license plates now.