Modern Home Servers – Power Savings

The Windows Home Server Team Blog has an interesting piece on the running costs of a modern home server versus a regular PC.  They found the annual running costs to be around £25 versus £295!  This echoes our finding in a piece we wrote a couple of years ago on running a NAS versus a PC.

Even then (in a time with lower electricity prices) our more conservative comparison found the NAS cost around £17.00 to run for a year compared to around £145.00 for a PC.  When most other energy saving technologies Solar/Wind/HeatPump etc still appear to have huge payback times, it seems you really could benefit financially from buying a new home server.  For example in the best power saving senario the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo Home Server 1500 at around £400 could be considered to have been “free” in under 18 months!

“With energy prices rising across the world, it’s pretty clear that all of us will be paying a lot more attention to how we consume power in our houses – especially those devices that we tend to leave ‘on’ more than others – like PCs, A/V equipment, and of course our trusty Windows Home Servers.  😉  One of our partners, Fujitsu-Siemens (or FSC for short) opted to differentiate their Windows Home Server offering, the FSC Scaleo, by focusing on reducing power consumption thru innovative software and a great hardware platform.  The results from their lab, below, speak for themselves.  I’ve compared their results with an average PC in the home (and yes, I used the ‘extreme’ example here to prove a point).  This translates into real, significant $$ folks!”

Read the full article here – blogs.technet.com/homeserver