To timidly go where many have gone before

(I started out to write about my experience evaluating the T2000. It turns out that I had a few things to say as a prelude, so I've broken this into multiple posts.)

It appears that at least one person has read my blog, as I have a request to post details about the T2000 evaluation I reently performed. I won't be able to say as much as I'd like to, as some of the information might be considered "material" for SEC purposes, and I'd rather err on the safe side. For example, I'd love to say how much we'd save in operating costs over three years by using the Niagara servers, but that's probably saying too much. But I should be able to say enough to make writing this worthwhile.

Before we received the T2000, there was some discussion of breakeven ratio, i.e., how many of our current servers (e.g., v210's) would we need to replace with a T2000 for it to be worth doing so. The initial conversations took into account nothing more than the price of the hardware, but after a quick whiteboard estimate of space and power savings, I worked up a spreadsheet to determine the breakeven ratio (or to calculate the savings based on the measured ratio, depending on how you look at it.) (And I'll state here that my first attempt at this spreadsheet was a freshman effort. A colleague with more accounting experience reworked it to be what it should be.)

(I'll add here that I'm a little bit embarassed to admit that we hadn't been taking space and power costs into consideration for our earlier hardware purchases. OTOH, there still appear to be quite a few people out there who make the assumption that the cheapest white box they can get is the way to go.)

Once we started looking at the space and power costs for servers, the breakeven ratios for the T2000 vs. our current servers dropped quite a bit. As a purely theoretical example, if we assume that we'll end up paying $16,000 for a T2000, and we're comparing this to an x86 server that we'd pay $2,000 for, the breakeven ratio based purely on hardware cost is 8:1. But if we factor in space and power costs, that ratio falls to 4.2:1. (This example is using real space and power costs, but it assumes that the application currently running on those x86 servers could be moved to a SPARC server with no cost.)

To sum up the above into an obvious statement: It's important to look at more than just the cost of hardware when deciding what hardware to purchase. See more on this here.