Over the past couple of weeks I have been building a new server for the open source project Gallery. The server is a 1U chassis with 2x Quad Core CPUs (4x 2.5ghz, 50W), 16G of RAM and finally 4x 150G 10,000 rpm SATA drives (mostly) in a linux kernel software raid10 setup. I hooked it up to my kill-a-watt device and measured ~250W at power on (when everything is spinning up), dropping to ~180W at idle. At 100% CPU usage, it increased to 200W. I’d say that isn’t bad for a server with 8 CPUs and 4 fast spinning disks.
Bharat (the benevolent dictator for the Gallery project) and I went to the colo where it is hosted and did the swap last night from ~8:00P to 1:00A. We started with an rsync to catch the box up to current w/o impacting the site, then brought it down and did another final (smaller) rsync followed by bringing up the new server. This went very well and we did a few tests to make sure everything was working right such as rebooting via serial console, dropping to init 1 and a few other things. Since it went so well, we also went ahead and updated all the software on the box while we were there just in case we had problems. That went great, so Gallery is on some nice new hardware.
I’ll leave you with a nice picture of the new server.