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Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't make any assumptions about Google's servers. Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.

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Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.

I was working based on this paper written by Google researchers in June 2007, which refers to one of Google's "typical" servers having a theoretical peak power of 213W and an actual peak power of 145W:

http://research.google.com/archive/power_provisioning.pdf

While I agree that in general information about Google's systems is a mix of inaccurate and out-of-date, I think it's probably safe to trust numbers given in research papers published by Google... especially when the numbers deal with how much power is being used, and the topic of the paper is power distribution within datacenters.

I think you're reading too much into the word "typical". It might be better understood as "example" or "typical of what is often found in a datacenter". Notice that all of the actual measured data in that paper is normalized to a value between 0 and 1, not given in watts.

145W is the heat generated by the box, including the work necessary to get the heat out of the box.

How much power does it take to get that heat out of the building?

I ask because the utility company numbers include both, while the "machine power" numbers only include the former.

Or you probably could trust Paul, who seemingly worked on Googles servers since just about near the beginning...

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