Resumen: A major concern for future mobile networks is to meet extremely stringent reliability requirements without incurring very high energy consumption. To this aim, we need auto-scaling techniques to switch on/off servers on demand, ensuring that they are active when required. One key challenge is to keep the right number of active servers while accounting for both the fallibility of servers and their non-zero boot up time: if this number is too small we risk service disruption, but if it is too large resources will be wasted. In this paper, we analyze this challenge by assessing the performance of different strategies to support an energy-efficient highly-reliable service, which range from deploying few blade (i.e., reliable) servers to deploying many nano (i.e., unreliable) servers. Our main take-away message is two-fold: (1) a server farm of nano servers can provide a more energy efficient operation than a farm of blade servers, but (2) it involves a very dynamic operation both in terms of task migrations and (de)activations, which challenges the endurance of the hardware. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.1016/j.comcom.2023.10.001 Año: 2023 Publicado en: COMPUTER COMMUNICATIONS 212 (2023), 251-261 ISSN: 0140-3664 Factor impacto JCR: 4.5 (2023) Categ. JCR: COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS rank: 51 / 250 = 0.204 (2023) - Q1 - T1 Categ. JCR: TELECOMMUNICATIONS rank: 28 / 119 = 0.235 (2023) - Q1 - T1 Categ. JCR: ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC rank: 80 / 353 = 0.227 (2023) - Q1 - T1 Factor impacto CITESCORE: 14.1 - Computer Networks and Communications (Q1)