Does the "Cloud" run on physical servers in datacenters

Posted Jun 8, 2013 20:25 UTC (Sat) by dark (guest, #8483)
In reply to: Does the "Cloud" run on physical servers in datacenters by giraffedata
Parent article: An introduction to OpenStack

Well... a cloud provider does have the option of powering down unused machines until they're needed for peak capacity. With power being an increasing part of the cost of servers, this can be a significant savings.

For small customers the savings probably wouldn't be worth the overhead of setting up the infrastructure for managing this. Besides, I don't know any data center that would actually give a discount for powered-down servers :) Maybe if it catches on...

Also, even if small customers could do this with their own machines, a cloud provider could do it more aggressively because their total load is more predictable.