Cost of home servers and network infrastructure

Last year I got my current UPS. Today¹ the cumulative power usage reached 1,000 kWh. Hence, I decided to do some calculations and changes.

I’m lucky to have a cheap (but fixed term) electricity contract till end of 2022.

The average power consumption was 110 W. It means 80 kWh and 8 € per month, not bad. Unfortunately, my cheap energy contract doesn’t stay for good, and in future the cost will be 2-3 times the current one.

Distribution of power consumption:

I ended up to explode both servers and recreate them with new roles. The main server took NAS duties and NAS became a backup server. It enables me to keep backup server powered off up to 21 hours per day. It reduces costs and unnecessary heat in the rack. Now the power consumption is 70-80 W.

The earlier setup of dedicated server and NAS was overkill for home use. It also produced unnecessary complexity.

ECC memory on both servers enables safe use of ZFS. Now I finally got good and simple implementation for remote filesystem snapshots. My infrastructure is heavily built on top of virtual machines. Automated and frequent local and remote ZFS snapshots of VM volumes are <3.

I wish to see some day on market low power ARM servers which can replace these energy wasteful x86 servers.