It would save some power if we could merge two of those.
Is your goal greener IT "only"
I'm not meaning that this doesn't matter but try to understand what the rational is.
Although I'm not always prone to promote VM, this could be one option.
Another one is to deploy servers that are right sized given your needs. That's what I'm doing here, both Zentyal (running as internet gateway) and OpenMediaVault (for file sharing) are running on HP 40L micro servers.
OK, this is for SoHo deployment. For bigger sites, HP 56L exists now.
Would you need even bigger, still not trying to cluster everything on one single hardware, I would suggest to look at blade concept.
That's another topic that should be discussed elsewhere (there is no coffee corner in this forum to discuss non-Zentyal stuff
) let me introduce my view with few words:
- CPU are nowadays quite well managed and can really reduce power fingerprint when not used.
- same for disks if rightly configured to slowdown.
- power supply are not yet at this stage, even if it improves.
by running multiple (blade) servers sharing same redundant power supply, you will benefit from power supply redundancy and shared, therefore better optimized power consumption.
I'll try to find some studies showing impact of power supply in term of power consumption fingerprint.
Drawback is that such design exists for large deployment (look at what IBM or HP can provide here) while this is trickier for small or even medium organizations.
You may find however blade like boxes embedding micro or pico-ATX motherboards.
End of my almost off-topic point