Stewie`s Blog

Last week a new shipment of 9th generation Dell servers arrived, powered by the new quadcore Intel Xeon CPU. The same day we started the mass replacement of servers in Rotterdam, one of our four datacenter locations. Over 120 Dell dual Xeon servers, build in in the last two months of 2005 and in 2006, will be replaced by the new generation of servers. Although the old servers are without exception less than 24 months old, they are already obsolete.

In the fast growing datacenter market, energy prices are rising every year. Nowadays, energy costs are 25% of the total datacenter costs (*) and this number is growing every year. As gaming servers are very CPU intensive, and the CPU is the most energy consuming part of the server, electricity costs are a major part of the total costs.

The new Dell servers use 60% less power than the older Dell 1425 and Dell 1850 servers; performance wise are the new servers over two times faster. In total the power consumption will drop by 75% while keeping the same performance level. i3D made an invested €100.000 in the last two months to make all four datacenter locations more energy efficient. After the Rotterdam location, i3D will focus on Frankfurt and London. All Amsterdam services have already been migrated to the new generation of Dell servers in the first half of 2007.

* = including housing, connectivity, monitoring and management costs.