One of my recent fascinations has been with the Intel Atom based motherboards. For those of you who never cared to delve into them, the Atom 330 motherboards offer:

• Dual core 1.6GHz processor
• 2GB or 4GB max RAM
• 2 to 4 SATA ports
• Sometimes a PATA connector
• Single or dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet NICs
• Typically one PCI slot
• Usually ITX form factor

Is it a workhorse? No, not really, but with a peak power utilization of 35watts including hard drives they’re worth looking at for home servers or targeted appliances in the workplace. I’m currently using a SuperMicro 5015A-H as an Untangle firewall appliance for forty users or so, and to be honest it’s bored. A second 5015A-H is acting as my corporate web server. Both applications are well suited because they don’t need much horsepower to accomplish their tasks yet, for a number of reasons, each is best suited to be a physical device versus a virtual machine.

Now I’m not a tree hugging, Earth loving, non-ozone-deleting (have you seen the cars I drive?), green tech evangelist. But I must say I think I do make sensible power conservation suggestions at home and at work.

Which leads me to the punchline of all this… My office at work is cold, and has been cold, regardless of my complaints to the maintenance crew. So I brought in a personal space heater, plugged it in, and I was a rather happy (and toasty) camper. As I adjusted the thermostat just now it occurred to me: this is a 1200watt electric space heater, and 1200watts is more than my T1 router, Atom firewall, switches, Atom web server, and dual socket I7 Xeon VMware ESXi server with 10k drives & 4TB of storage combined.

So much for electric, or thermal, efficiency.