• Bookstore

It was announced at the House of Commons in December, that a typical medium sized server has a similar footprint to a 4x4. This was confirmed by VeryPC's development team, who found a typical hosting centre server running at 400Watts had a similar footprint to a Range Rover Sport doing 10,000 miles per year.

The VeryPC response was the Janus II, a pair of 8 core servers (side by side) in one package. Each server is suitable for use as a database server, a terminal server, a computational server or a render farm. Despite this, a single Janus II unit provides these two servers from just 67W per server. That contrasts with the power usage of a normal 8 core x86 server - not typically idling at less than 150W and often a great deal more.   The Janus II unit is not short on computing power, each server has a pair of 2.5GHz Xeon Quad Core chips, 160GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. The unit has 8 2.5" hot swap bays, 4 per server, which can accommodate SAS or SATA disks in RAID 0,1,5 or 10.   When running SISoft arithmetic benchmarks each server uses 126W and was tested at 73.3 GFlops.

Thus, the whole Janus II unit runs at 277W to produce 146.6 GFlops.   A resulting efficiency of 529 GFlops per KW. Whereas the most achieved by X86 previously was about 290GFlops per KW.   By contrast to the 4x4, a comparative footprint of one of the servers in a Janus unit was more like that of moped again doing 10,000 miles per year.   As an example of the possible cash savings, a customer replacing 84 1u servers with a full cabinet of 42 Janus II units could reduce their electricity bill by around £15,000 a year.  Janus II uses VeryPC's GreenPC 'Know How', and has features like low voltage CPU's, support for virtualization, Native ECC RAM, a 93% efficient PSU and 1.5 Watt 7200RPM Hard Disks.

Server options include 2TB of RAID 10 storage, up to 48GB RAM, 10GB Ethernet or clever hardware management cards, but each of these will add to the power footprint.

VeryPC MD Peter Hopton said:
"Janus II sets a new record for server efficiency. Assembled in Sheffield, the unit can be customised to the customers need exactly, minimising waste and logistical energy.

"And, as with all VeryPC products, as being operationally more efficient, Janus II provides good reductions in manufacturing energy, logistical energy and waste electronics."

The Janus II box of two servers' price starts from £3,999.