I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?
Kind of “older”, i guess… the ones I have at work are from 2017. Each server has 36 10TB 3.5" harddrives and they’re the main power hog. Each server eats around 1.2kW. Each storage cluster holds four of these servers for a total of 1.2PB of storage space. The entire cluster is powered by a 5kVA UPS.
Quite power hungry, but pretty lean when compared to other methods for running that amount of storage.