Tier IV Costs $15,400 to Support $2,500 Server

Spending $2,500 on a server really means spending between $8,300 and $15,400 (at Tier IV standards) in facility capital to house and power the server. That factoid is among the data outlined by Ken Brill of The Uptime Institute in a piece today in Forbes. An excerpt:

We are currently in the biggest data center construction boom in history. At the same time, this boom is dramatically weakening the future flexibility and financial performance of information technology.

Brill calls upon companies to merge their IT and facilities departments and “dramatically improve cost knowledge within IT.”

“Servers aren’t as cheap as they first appear!,” Brill concludes. “But this doesn’t mean we should stop buying servers. We merely need to assure all relevant costs are included when making investment decisions.” One other thing: turn off those obsolete and unused servers, and you can save hundreds of millions of dollars in the next 10 years and defer new data center construction.

RELATED POSTS:

• Uptime’s Ken Brill on Data Center Power Costs
• Uptime's Ken Brill on Data Center Power Costs
• Server Refreshes On Tap for 2008
• Data Center Costs and Moore’s Law
• Data Center Costs and Moore's Law

About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.