Help me reduce servers? (1 Viewer)

[mikester]

I'm currently running 2 servers on our home network, and after our last electric bill neared $400 (Houston in the summer FTL) we are trying to cut energy usage anywhere we can. I'm trying to figure out how I could pare this down to run everything on 1 server, hopefully with little to no investment in new hardware.

What I have now

TV Server: Core2Duo E7200 on ECS motherboard, 4GB RAM, running on Windows Home Server (I know, not supported but works fine). I'm not really using any WHS stuff yet, but would like to start using it for photos, music, etc. storage and backup. TVServer seems to run fine serving at least 2 clients at once, haven't tested anymore. Eventually we will have a total of 4-5 clients, with no more than 2-3 in use at one time.

Media Server: Old Celeron 3 GHz processor on an AB9 Pro motherboard with 2GB RAM. I'm running Unraid, which makes a very nice NAS but unfortunately it ties up a whole machine. The AB9 Pro has 10 onboard SATA ports, which means it is probably the motherboard to use for any consolidated server since I already have 9 drives in use between the 2 servers.

What I've tried

This weekend, I tried moving the E7200 and 4GB RAM to the AB9 Pro and setting up a new installation of WHS and TVServer. I got everything installed, but couldn't get TVServer to work with my Hauppauge analog cards. It always gave me the "No Audio/Video detected" error, whether I was plugged directly into the cable or going through the STB and SVideo. Since this worked great with the other machine running WHS, I think the problem must be related to the firmware on this motherboard. I did have to flash to a beta BIOS to support the 45nm processor, so maybe the BIOS is flakey and that's why it didn't work. So anyway, my first idea of running everything on a big WHS box is out the window, unless I buy another motherboard and hope it works better.

What I'm considering

I've thought about using the AB9 Pro with the E7200 processor and 4GB RAM and install Vista64 (I have a copy laying around I'm no longer using). Then I could run TVServer on that machine and maybe even add another 4GB memory and have a nice sized RAMDisk for the timeshift buffer. For my storage, I have a couple of options:

1) Just have a bunch of harddrives, no managed storage at all. I would probably mirror 2 of the drives for critical stuff like photos, software, documents, etc. The rest of the drives would hold ripped dvds and videos, so it would be a major pain if a drive crashed, but I wouldn't lose anything irreplaceable.

2) Run WHS or UnRaid on VMWare on top of Vista64. I would definitely need to throw another 4GB RAM in, since virtual machine + ramdisk would chew up some serious memory. This would be a very nice consolidated server, but am I asking too much of this little E7200?

I would like to get feedback on these options, or any other ideas/experience you guys have with running an all-in-one tv/media storage server.

 

[SciDoctor]

Hibernation and WOL are your new best friends.

I also use a usb RF remote that can awaken the PC from S3/S4.

I have dramaticaly cut my electicity usage to between 4 and 7 units a day (1 unit equals 1 kilowatt hour, 1 unit costs between 10-15 UK pennies about 20-30 US cents).

Also manage your time away from PC, you may think you have just been a few minutes away from your active PC but in reality it could be thirty minutes plus so use sensible hibernation and you save again.

The only real drawback is the small wait for PC awake, the advantage is you save a lot.

I used to reach 20 units a day easily, the savings I made are extraordinary when I look back now.

 

[mikester]

Hibernation and WOL are your new best friends.

I also use a usb RF remote that can awaken the PC from S3/S4.

I do the same thing with the client pcs - we use the Gyration RF remotes and they work great at waking the computers when we want to watch TV. The main area I'm looking at optimizing are the servers.

I think I've seen posts about setting up TV-Server to hibernate when not being used and when there are no scheduled recordings. I guess I could look into that. The other server is more problematic, because Unraid doesn't support any sort of hibernation or WOL. It does spin down idle harddrives, so with everything at idle it doesn't draw very much. I might have to replace that old Celeron with one of the newer Celeron's that is more efficient. We are using Celeron 430's in a couple of our client pcs, and those are amazing little chips and very efficient.

I think I need to pick up a kill-a-watt meter to measure exactly what's going on, and see if the savings are worth it. If it costs $200 in new hardware to save $5/month, then it wouldn't really be worth it.

 

[Marcusb]

since you have nine drives, make sure you have them set to spin down when not in use first of all.
Each drive uses around 20 watts of electricity when just spinning and around five watts when in its low power state.

Since you have so many, you either have a LOT of media to store, or a lot of old drives added together. Maybe it is time to upgrade to a single 750Gb drive if that is the situation? These are very cheap and will give better performance and also probably make your data safer than if it's on a lot of older drives.
The side effect of this would also be to save you energy usage.

I know i'm just focussing on the drives here, but to me, this seems like an area you can probably cheaply and easily save some money and get a better result with minimal outlay.

Marcus.

 

[roe]

My power bill winter = $1000
Summer = $500-$600

 

[Mouch.net]

As already said, hibernation is always a good way to reduce power cosumption when pc is not needed.
It was no solution for me because i'm running web/mail server on it.

So my solution was :
Low power cpu 45w dual core + undervolting
Ati chip > lower power than nvidia and intel
IGP chip instead of Graphic adapter
only 1 HDD and 1 Optical drive
high quality power supply

though I does not want server stuf to run on same machine than htpc (for security reason)
My host system is running MP and Virtual machines are running my server and test stuff.

hope I could help...

 

[SciDoctor]

Another good point brought up by Mouch.net is the PSU.

Cheap and ineffiicient PSU waste alot of energy and some have efficiency as low as 50%, so ensure you have a modern high efficiency PSU (85-90%+).

Updating an old Suttle SFF to a new PSU saved nearly 2-3 units a day!

 

[SMa]

Another good point brought up by Mouch.net is the PSU.

Cheap and ineffiicient PSU waste alot of energy and some have efficiency as low as 50%, so ensure you have a modern high efficiency PSU (85-90%+).

Updating an old Suttle SFF to a new PSU saved nearly 2-3 units a day!

And when you buy a high efficiency PSU don't exagerate with the watts, between 300W and 400W will be more than enough.
A PSU is most efficient around 50% of its maximum load.

 

[mikester]

Thanks for all the tips. I bought a Kill A Watt meter today, and plan to start doing some experiments with power consumption, not only with the PCs but with other appliances in the house.

Hopefully between Unraid spinning down all the drives on that server, and getting hibernation working on the TV server, I can get my usage down to something acceptable and not have to worry about consolidating servers.

I'll update this thread with my findings and maybe it will help someone in the future.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I'll update this thread with my findings and maybe it will help someone in the future.

Please do, in this eco age more info the better

If can get some really good low Power consumption results, will make a sticky, so others can benefit, so if anyone considers themselves eco friendly, post your results for all to see.

Might be worthwhile going for SD and HD systems, as i believe it would be unfair to consider them the same (shoot me if i'm wrong) just my immediate hardware kneejerk reaction