An interesting article regarding Duber Studio of the Czech Republic and how they use Deadline to reduce facility costs. The Power Management feature allows Deadline to turn off computers when the farm is idle, and turning them back on when required. The full article can be read on Thinkbox’s website.
Duber Studio uses Thinkbox's Deadline to reduce costs
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I would lke to note that not only does it save costs by turning machines off when idle, you can use temperature sensors to shut down machines if the environment gets too hot – say in the case of your A/C system failing or getting overloaded, and it can even turn them back on once the problem is resolved.
Thanks for letting us know, Chris.
We turned on this feature and managed to save hundreds of dollars a month. It’s well worth it.
Has electronics quality reached the point it can take the heating and cooling cycle from repetitive powering cycling? The expansion and contraction from heat to cold is a factor in the life of a circuit board.
Back in the day we would avoid power cycling due to equipment getting out of sync. What if any hand holding dose sys-admin do to keep the system humming along? Man If backburner loese a machine there is hell to pay!
I would like to see someone track the difference of equipments life span between equipment power cycling and not.
othoap,
Deadline uses power-saving mode of the computer and puts it to sleep – so it isn’t actually the *identical* to powercycliing a machine as the computer still has power, just far far less.
Additionally – the temperature conditions in a server room should be fairly regular regardless if machines are on or not [presuming the room is loaded appropriately] so environmental heat concerns are unlikely unless the system fails. As noted earlier, with appropriate temp sensors, deadline can shut down systems in a catastrophic a/c failure: the alternative of having them attempt to function as the room heat spirals out of control is imho far worse than the power-cycling.
Finally, we used Deadline’s power management on our render farm without problems and well beyond the useable life-span of those machines. To clarify: as rendering needs increased and cpu’s advanced the computers became essentially useless for rendering far before any failures occurred . In fact we haven’t seen any power management related hardware failures at all.
We did save tens of thousands of dollars in power and a/c costs though.
cheers,
chris bond