Only a few survived without big markups, those with highest efficiency.
Many of the servers we use now cost in electricity as much as 77€ a month EACH and that's just for a 4 drive server, and these used to be merely 16€/month just few months ago, almost 5x increase. Some servers are even the 200€/month range just for power alone.
Even the lowest power systems where power barely entered into equation are now more than 12€ a month on average use on power usage, the ZEN MiniDedis which we have sold plenty at 20-25€ price range.
How did we end up with these prices?
Where our current electricity costs have "merely" almost quadrupled so far, that's not the only cost. Cooling adds a multiplier to that cost, and we had to estimate slight increase to today's pricing as well. Hence going from raw cost of say 0,10€/kWh and with PUE of 1,25 the actual price was 0,125€/kWh, that is an additional 0,025€/kWh for cooling. Now if you goto 0,35€ + 25% = 0,4375€/kWh -- now the cooling addition is 0,0875€/kWh. We took the expected electricity costs for this week and added few % on top as safety margin. We do however expect prices to go even much beyond this over the winter. The market is now again peaking at 0,70€/kWh.
How is electricity price formulated?
We take the raw cost and then add all the infrastructure and maintenance related for power delivery. For example, we take the chillers with their expected lifetime and annualized expected maintenance costs.
We then add the power consumption of cooling annualized. Finally, we divide these total costs with the production capacity to get to kWh rate. We run highly efficient datacenter, but even then it's quite an multiplication since during summers we do have to run chillers.
Friday, September 30, 2022
