The team over at lowpowerservers.com were on-site with a customer in Central London this week when a major power cut severely impacted the office building. IT services started to fail, traffic lights went dark, and local services were brought to a standstill, with some people even being trapped underground between tube stations!
The resulting blog of the experience raises some interesting questions and suggests a different way of approaching disaster planning, specifically regarding a complete loss of power.
What if they had been using an ARM® Server?
Inspired by the power cut we experienced in central London, the table below compares a traditional x86 server environment with an ultra-low power ARM®-based server showing how the Boston Viridis consumes as little 8.5W for over 7 hours!
| Servers Type | Number of servers/cores | Power Consumption | Lifetime on UPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel E5-2680 | 4 servers / 64 cores | 1560w | 38.4mins |
| Viridis Cortex A9 | 180 servers / 720 cores | 1530w | 39.2mins |
| Viridis Cortex A9 | 16 servers / 64 cores | 136w | 441mins / 7.3hrs |
This shows how the customer would have been able to continue delivering services for the duration of the power cut - but only if it was using the ultra-low power Boston Viridis.
Read more about the experience at lowpowerservers.com.
To help our clients make informed decisions about new technologies, we have opened up our research & development facilities and actively encourage customers to try the latest platforms using their own tools and if necessary together with their existing hardware. Remote access is also available
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