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:

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.