DL580 less power use

[Jonathan Greensit]

We have just bough a DL580 G2 second hand to replace our home server setup as it was really struggling. It all seems to work fine running windows 2003 enterprise and a few virtual machines controlling webmail/ftp etc. i have checked the power that it is drawing and even while idle it pulls 300w. my guess is it is the fans that are causing this problem. is there any way to convince it the it does not need all the fans, pci slots have nothing that gets hot in there so no need for massive fan there. cpu and memory fans are all thats needed. If not any ideas how to reduse power use. don't want to have to turn it off during the day but 300w 24/7 will add up.

Thanks

Jon

[Heironimus]

You may be able to just pull a few of the fans out and let it run, though the fault light will stay on if you do that. As I recall, the fans inside a 580 are pretty easy to install and remove.

But if I had to guess your big power draw is more likely the processors. A 580G2 will have 1-4 Xeon MPs. That generation draws a lot of power even at idle - and generates a lot of heat, which means you may want to be careful about pulling fans. The 10k or 15k RPM drives don't help, either.

The real answer is that noise and power are part of the cost of buying a rackmount server made for a datacenter.

[James ~ Happy Dude]

Jon,
Make sure You have the Latest PSP; They contains "HEALTH DRIVERS" which regulates how the fans should work in sync with the Load on the servers.
This is very much corrected in certain G2/G5 servers.
Refer: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00772855&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN


Also update the firmware.

Regards,

[David Claypool]

Yep, Heironomus is correct. You have chosen a system from a time period when processors consumed the very most power. If you consider your 3-5 year cost of ownership, you probably could buy a newer server that consumes less power (and might even be faster).

Here's some info on DL580G2 power:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00881066/c00881066.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[Blazhev_1]

Hi,

you can check :

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00300430/c00300430.pdf

about the CPU power consumption, maybe Dynamic power savings mode.

With ilo2 there is a feature called power capping, which allows you to control power consumption by configuring max power that can be consumed.

As the POST checks the minimum required fans(4 in your case - 1 for PCI zone, 1 for memory zone, 2 for CPU zone), you need to have them.
IF you have additional fans, you can pull them out, but the server will become louder.

Regards