Why Does the Sun Fire T1000 use 180 Watts?
If you looked at computers in datacenters 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago the thing most cabinets had in common was one 30 Amp 220V power plug, from this we could see that each cabinet could draw 6600 Watts. So for years we had a simple relationship between the floor area and the power/cooling requirements of the datacenter. We could just roll cabinets in and out without having to worry about power or cooling. Around 5 years ago small 2 processor servers started entering the datacenter we could get 12 to 16 of these in a rack which was great but often power and cooling requirement per rack increased up to 20000 Watts, this is just too much for the typical datacenter so we end up putting servers in small piles giving us the lilliput server farm. So once power and cooling are factored in the TOC per server is high.

Designing a 1U server for server farms if we are constrained by the server room door 42RU (Rack Units) and one power socket 6600 Watts, add in power sequencers, smaller racks etc we may have only have 32RUs free giving a power range of 140 Watts to 200 Watts per RU. The T1000 comes in at 180 Watts putting it in the sweet spot of the power vs space trade off.