So, we have found that that really IS correct, though perhaps not in the ways you might think. For example, a major problem with servers today is the accepted geometry: 1U or 2U x 19". In order to drive density, you are either doing dual socket in 2U or single socket in 1U -- but to make that geometry work you have small fans that really have to crank fans to ram air through. (And have we mentioned that the AC power supplies also need fans?). These little screamers are acoustically distasteful, but it's worse than that: they have to do much more work (and draw more power!) to move a fraction of the air because they are so small (air movement is ~cubic with respect to diameter). By changing the enclosure geometry (our sleds are 100mm high) we have much larger fans (80mm). The upshot? Our fans move SO much more air that we can run them much more slowly (we worked with our fan provider to drop the RPM at 0% PWM from 5000 RPM to 2000 RPM) -- which means our rack is not only silent by comparison, it means the power in the rack is going to compute rather than fans.
So, this isn't really chasing the 0.1% -- it's chasing much bigger wins, and it's doing it by changing the power distribution (shelf of rectifiers to a 54V DC busbar vs. redundant AC power supplies in every 1U/2U), changing the cooling (the larger fans), changing the networking (we have a blindmated cabled backplane, obviating the need for operator cabling), etc. etc. These are not just multipliers on efficiency, but also on manageability: once physically installed, our rack is designed to be provisioning VMs orders of magnitude faster than the traditional manual rack/stack/cable/SW install.
So, this isn't really chasing the 0.1% -- it's chasing much bigger wins, and it's doing it by changing the power distribution (shelf of rectifiers to a 54V DC busbar vs. redundant AC power supplies in every 1U/2U), changing the cooling (the larger fans), changing the networking (we have a blindmated cabled backplane, obviating the need for operator cabling), etc. etc. These are not just multipliers on efficiency, but also on manageability: once physically installed, our rack is designed to be provisioning VMs orders of magnitude faster than the traditional manual rack/stack/cable/SW install.