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A comment on Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally big, competitively small. Parent comment

Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by ajross on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @02:27PM (#26715501)
Most servers are doing things for human beings, and we have irregular schedules. Standard rule of thumb is that you plan for a peak capacity of 10x average. A datacenter that doesn't have significant idle capacity is one that's some kind of weird special purpose thing like a mining facility.
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Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by adrian_b on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @03:47PM (#26716522)
That's true, but I would expect that most idle servers are turned off and they use Wake-on-LAN to become active when there is work to do.

Just a few servers could be kept idle, not off, to enable a sub-second start-up time for some new work.

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Re:Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally bi... by cduzz on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @09:24AM (#26724539)
Servers are very expensive. It is not cost efficient to buy a server and let it sit idle or turn it off.

Even purchased on the used market, a decent server could cost $4000; if you spread that cost across 4 years, that's $80ish per month just to pay for the server, which is probably around your power / rent costs.

The costs are more stark if you're buying new, where it is easy to sped $10-30k for a decent spec server.

Don't buy a server to leave it turned off, you're wasting money.

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