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Comment by aaronax | Hacker News Reader

Difficult to say. That could conceivably fit in one rack of 60 compute nodes (1/2U size) at 200VMs per node, leaving 15U for networking and SAN. Maybe $100/year/VM (rough cost of a lower-end cloud VM like EC2, droplet, etc.) in that case so $1.2 million per year cost.

Or it could take 10 racks and $50 million per year.

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The article says, right at the start,

> Anexia was founded in 2006, is based in Austria, and provides cloud services from over 100 locations around the world by placing equipment in third party datacenters.

From the company's homepage:

> The founder and CEO of Anexia [...] recently acquired a small hydropower plant in Kammern in the Liesingtal region of Styria for a “significant seven-figure sum” – i.e. several million euros. The power plant on the River Liesing generates 600 KW of electricity, enough to cover a third of the electricity consumption of Anexia’s Vienna data center

so this seems to be a significant operation.

While average power consumption per rack has been increasing fairly steadily over the past 10 years, the metric I currently use is abound 10kW per rack under reasonable to heavy load - that's about the same as a consumer electric shower.

So, this is implying their Vienna data center has 180 racks? With 60 being about a third, if we say each rack has 40 servers... that's ~7k servers total... which is a sizeable chunk of floor space, like 3000m^2, or... 40 tennis courts?

But yea, that a non-insignificant operation just for the Vienna data center.

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