> which is also why server hardware tends to get the smallest sizes first, as they least care about idle power consumption if they're being utilized correctly.
That's certainly true for Google or Amazon but not for most real corporate IT departments. It's very common for small offices to need a local server for one reason or another even though the thing will be idle most of the time.
Moving the server into a larger datacenter would require a faster network link to that office which would be both more expensive and slower for local employees than the local server. So every little office gets a server which is mostly idle.
And then you need two of them for redundancy. And then you need four of them because one app touches credit cards and needs to be in the PCI CDE and the other doesn't etc. etc.
>That's certainly true for Google or Amazon but not for most real corporate IT departments.
I can't speak for all corporate IT departments, but I'm at a very large corporation that certainly cares about idle power consumption. Over the years our servers have gotten more powerful, and more power hungry. It's not that hard to add more power, but adding new cooling isn't so easy. The less power we use overall, the less cooling we have to add, and the happier we are.
You have the comparison backwards. The claim is that Google and Amazon don't care about idle power consumption, presumably because their homogeneous computing environments lead to relatively little idle time.
That's certainly true for Google or Amazon but not for most real corporate IT departments. It's very common for small offices to need a local server for one reason or another even though the thing will be idle most of the time.
Moving the server into a larger datacenter would require a faster network link to that office which would be both more expensive and slower for local employees than the local server. So every little office gets a server which is mostly idle.
And then you need two of them for redundancy. And then you need four of them because one app touches credit cards and needs to be in the PCI CDE and the other doesn't etc. etc.