What is industry standard for capping power on servers?

HostMayo · April 15

Gemini says the industry standard is 250 watts per server but was curious if other providers even do that. Like for popular configs of 128 gb E5s or 256 xeon etc servers they might draw not less than 300 watt under peak so throttling them using server power cap would effect the performance alot. Should I aim for 250/300 watt power cap or no power cap at all?

Shakib · April 15

No cap

somik · April 15

@Shakib said:
No cap

I'm pretty sure most places state their power "cap", specially in their ToS or if you ping them. It's usually between 3000 and 4500W (depending on whether they are using a 15 or 20A breaker on the outlets going to your server). The 250W "limit" you are seeing is the limit for "free" usage. After that, you get charged extra for the power usage.

slowservers · April 16

That cap is really important if you are power-bound in your datacenter. There's also thermal considerations that some datacenters can only cool so much per rack.

I went in a very different direction with Slow Servers and picked very low TDP processors.

Newest one, Loki, is 41W-53W when fully throttled. 42W-68W otherwise.

https://slowservers.net/hosts/loki/

6 cores, 32GB ECC memory, and 1TB SSD.

I think I can do slightly better with 2x 16GB registered ECC DDR3 sticks.

HostMayo · April 26

yeah got stuck on a rack with max power allowed 2x20A breaker. Have to plug off few servers due to breakers tripping down. Now going to get a rack form microtonixdc since the power seems to be their main selling point.

What is industry standard for capping power on servers?

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