Meet Your $2k, $70k, and $30mm Servers
I'm amazed that when I chat with other IT professionals, I still hear people saying "...but after all, servers are cheap, I can get a 1u box for about $2-5k or less..."
Wrong.
Servers aren't cheap. Hardware is available at $2-5k or less... for equipment that you wouldn't necessarily want to put into your home office, much less your data center. (Really, you can buy cars for $1k too, but you wouldn't drive 'em anywhere where you needed reliability and durability.) So realistically, data center hardware with redundant power supplies and robust components is more expensive.
But let's call the hardware a gimme. Fine, it's $2k.
Let's talk about the other costs. Heating and cooling management. Rack space. Software licenses for all those standby servers. Administration (yes, Virginia, you have to patch your standby servers too). Power, power, and power.
You get the idea. According to Brad Day, a senior analyst and VP at Forrester research group, it costs about $70,000 per server for those "incidentals" over the (three to four year) life of the server.
So now your $2k server is a $70k server.
But wait, there's more...
A colleague was recently talking about building a (small) new data center. It was going to cost him $30mm. Why was he building it? He was out of space in his existing facility. So he was facing the $30mm server -- the one incremental machine that put him over the edge.
So we've moved from a $2k server, to a $70k server, to a $30mm server.
Suddenly, technologies that enable more efficient asset utilization and flexibility start looking very attractive.
At Scalent, we've built software that enables rapid server infrastructure repurposing -- so that your fixed investment in $2k hardware and $70k per machine isn't stuck running one server (or hypervisor) even at low utilization... and you shouldn't encounter the $30mm server any time soon.
Wrong.
Servers aren't cheap. Hardware is available at $2-5k or less... for equipment that you wouldn't necessarily want to put into your home office, much less your data center. (Really, you can buy cars for $1k too, but you wouldn't drive 'em anywhere where you needed reliability and durability.) So realistically, data center hardware with redundant power supplies and robust components is more expensive.
But let's call the hardware a gimme. Fine, it's $2k.
Let's talk about the other costs. Heating and cooling management. Rack space. Software licenses for all those standby servers. Administration (yes, Virginia, you have to patch your standby servers too). Power, power, and power.
You get the idea. According to Brad Day, a senior analyst and VP at Forrester research group, it costs about $70,000 per server for those "incidentals" over the (three to four year) life of the server.
So now your $2k server is a $70k server.
But wait, there's more...
A colleague was recently talking about building a (small) new data center. It was going to cost him $30mm. Why was he building it? He was out of space in his existing facility. So he was facing the $30mm server -- the one incremental machine that put him over the edge.
So we've moved from a $2k server, to a $70k server, to a $30mm server.
Suddenly, technologies that enable more efficient asset utilization and flexibility start looking very attractive.
At Scalent, we've built software that enables rapid server infrastructure repurposing -- so that your fixed investment in $2k hardware and $70k per machine isn't stuck running one server (or hypervisor) even at low utilization... and you shouldn't encounter the $30mm server any time soon.
posted by Scalent Systems at 2:53 PM
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