At 2:14 PM -0300 3/23/08, Ray Burkholder wrote:
My desktop has a 680 Watt power supply, but according to a meter I once connected, it is only running at 350 to 400 Watts. So if a server has a 980W power supply, does the rack power need to be designed to handle multiples of such a beast, even though the server may not come close (because it may not be fully loaded with drives or whatever)? Wouldn't it be better to do actual measurements to see the real draw might be?
Yes, if you perform the measurements both at peak cpu load and during power-up (quite a bit of well-known gear maxes out its power draw only during the power-on sequence). Also, you're still going to want to size the power drop so that the measured load won't exceed 80% capacity due to code. /John