azazel1024 I have no idea why you would think I am from NY. If you look at my name where the posts are you will see TEXAS. No where close to NY. I am sure we have cheaper electric rates than NY. I still run $200 to $300 dollars a month of electricity in the summer months. $20 is not much.
All my equipment has been hand picked over the years base on reliability. My equipment will run a year or more without requiring any attention. As stuff dies off I will replace it. The newer stuff is more energy efficient but it's not worth testing when I already have something which works really well.
You should replace your 2 16 switches with one 24 port switch since you are running multiple pipes from your servers. Having one backplane is faster than 2 with larger than GIG client pipes. I know maybe you have 3 or 4 ports linked together to bond the switches but 1 backplane is better. I would recommend a layer 3 switch you will be amazed at what one of these cheaper layer 3 switches can do. I have worked on many big Cisco switches in the past and I know what they can do but they are real expensive. I was afraid of the smaller cheaper ones thinking it would not be very good but the smaller Cisco layer 3 switch I got works really well and fast. I wish I had protocol routing to play with but oh well.
Huh, my bad. Someone else in a discussion of networking equipment power consumption was mentioning that they were in NY and also had a big rack of stuff pulling down significant juice 24x7.
Yeah, that is in large part why I want to move to a 24 port switch from 2x16. That said, the stuff I have off the 2nd switch is my light use stuff. AppleAir port that is being used as a wired only airplay receiver for some speakers, my MoCA bridge to provide connectivity for my DVR, my network printer and a couple of spare LAN drops that are normally not in use. I'd still prefer everything to be on one switch. With my needs I really don't look at anything beyond semi-managed. I don't need the full L2 features and especially not L3.
That doesn't mean I don't want or wouldn't mind having them, but I can't justify the extra power consumption and especially can't justify the extra expense for a full L2 or a semi/full L3.
On the off vs on, I've heard the argument that a lot of older equipment fails at power on. I think that is only somewhat true. I think the issue you run in to isn't that power on is hard, or that there is "momentum". I think the issue is that with a power on, you a lot of system checks and tests that are not normally conducted during normal operation. So if you have a failing or failed component, if it isn't fatal to the operation (IE a blown cap), then the system might just chug along, but it is going to be "discovered" as soon as you try to do a POST and the system will not boot. I'd argue it is better to discover the issue during POST (or failure to POST) than it is to keep the system plodding along only to have the failure possibly cause things like data corruption or fail when you need it most, rather than discovering the problem or about to be problem earlier and replace the hardware/machine.
Just like hard drives. If a drive fails on spin-up, I'd argue that it was just about to die even if you hadn't had the disks spin down. You might have possibly just discovered the issue a little earlier (well, or later since the drive spun down and it might have been hours/days before it spun up and failed to initialize). Occasional spin down (occasional) probably prolongs the drives life well beyond what you would have had, supposing you left the drive running constantly.
A lot of electronics eventually fail because one or more capacitors end up going bad. There are of course a lot of other reasons they could fail, but capacitors of most types have a limited useful life. One of the things that can accelerate this is heat, which is generated when the device is on. Time of course also "uses them up", for a number of types (much less of an issue for some types than other). You can also have eventual failure of a solder point, insulation, electron migration in transistors, etc.
Most of these are at least accelerated by use. Some are only caused by use. Some care caused primarily from time (on or off). Turning something on generally has minimal or no additional wear on solid state electronics (not necessarily so with mechanical devices). Granted, you might get 100,000hrs on a router before it fails if you run it 24x7x365 compared to 80,000hrs if you run it 18x7x365...but you might still get an extra full year of use out of it, even if it was fewer total hours of active use.
