I'm sitting here thinking about writing my first Blog post and trying to come up with something to say.  So I figured I'd start by trying to answer one of my least favourite questions (and before you all start to correct my spelling I'm not originally from the USA) and explain why it's so hard to answer.

The Question: "So much power does a blade enclosure use?"

The answer: "It depends."

What does it depend on? Everything.

How many Blades and which Blades do you have in the enclosure, which CPUS, are they the 50W, 60W, 80W, 95W or 120W versions, how many DIMMs and what size and rank are they, which mezzanines are installed, which Interconnects are installed, how many fans, what's the ambient temperature, what applications are running and how heavily loaded are they?

Even if you gave me all this information I still couldn't answer with any degree of accuracy, those final two items applications and application load really do have such a huge impact it makes it almost impossible to give the right answer. The best that I could do would be to give the maximum and minimum power usage based on that configuration and say you'll be somewhere in-between those two values.

In the next few posts I'll go into some detail about this starting with the affect hardware configuration has on power consumption.