Originally Posted by raymor

If he has 30 low to mid range servers he's wasting money guaranteed. The bottleneck is the hard drives. In most cases, even a single core CPU spends 98% of it's time sitting there waiting for the drives. In addition, at any given moment he probably has 20 servers doing virtually nothing whole others agree heavily loaded at the moment.

For Clonebox, we use 3U servers with 16 drives each and a pair of quad core processors. One of those would probably replace 10 of the servers he's using, while consuming less than a third of the space and power. He could run three of those for about a grand. If he fixed the one silly bug that's causing the extra load, a pair of such servers would probably be fine.