Fixing everything, really slowly

I sometimes get asked about energy savings from thin clients. It’s fairly straightforward to work out the energy consumption of the clients, but it’s harder know how how much power to budget for on the server side. Without specific requirements it really is a case of “it depends”.

While reading the excelent Virtual Reality Check – Phase II (via Virtualization.info) I was amazed that they didn’t even mention power consumption. Their tests showed that you could support between 80 and 165 user sessions from the test hardware (an HPDL380G6). I was interested to find out how much power this server uses, the answer (after way too long with HP’s Windows only, yet HTML, and Flash based Power Advisor) is about 410Watts, that’s between 5 and 2.5 Watts per user. Not bad!

Now I’d be the first to say that this hardware setup isn’t wat you’d use (or all that you’d need) in a thin client deployment of this size, but still it’s an impressive number. As the Virtual Reality Check report says the improvements in the last year are almost entirely due to CPU improvements from Intel. Nehalem certainly is quick.