You’ve seen it on the front pages of the papers lately. The program that offers consumers incentives to trade in older used cars for more fuel-efficient new cars is pushing auto sales into overdrive. The $1B in govt. funding for it was burned through in less than a week. The U.S. House of Representatives rushed through an additional $2B in emergency funds just to keep the program going, but will need Senate approval if it’s going to extend beyond Tuesday August 4th. My guess is to make a continuation of the program palatable to the U.S. taxpayer, the incentive will need to be cut (from $4500 for a new fuel-efficient car to somewhere in the $1-2k range) but it’s great to seen people buying cars and stimulating part of the economy – while getting older fuel-inefficient cars off the roads.
I saw an interesting article talking about whether a similar program for servers would work…and though I think it’s a creative idea, I’ll argue that Intel and our OEM partners have been offering “Cash for Clunkers” for quite some time now – without any U.S. taxpayer help. How? Through promoting the benefits of server refresh, a strategy that is proving to be one of the most beneficial investments to IT and business. Using the Xeon ROI Estimator I spent 2-3 minutes modeling potential savings by comparing 4-year old 2P Intel Xeon based servers to new 2P Intel Xeon 5500 based servers – and this is what I found:
An investment in one Intel Xeon 5500 based server (~$8.5k including purchase price, migration cost, and software validation) enables up to 10x performance per server, a 10:1 server consolidation opportunity vs. 10 older servers purchased 4 years ago that as an IT manager I can now get rid of. So where’s the cash for the clunkers? Well, I would save over $4k a year in energy costs and over $11k a year in server / software maintenance costs by cutting out the old and putting in the new. The 4-year total savings is about $38k, with a break even period of about 9 months. Not bad…and that doesn’t even take into consideration software licensing costs that I probably can save by cutting down the server count. Try modeling this yourself and check out the new PowerPoint report that you can generate from it – really explains the benefits in a way that the finance and facilities folks will find useful.
I also found this link that explains why Intel IT decided to move ahead with server refresh in 2009 after current economic conditions forced Intel to re-evaluate the strategy. Analysis found that delaying server refresh for a year would increase costs by USD 19 million.
And a refresh strategy also applies to the bigger 4 Socket and above servers as well, as documented in this server refresh brief.
Server Refresh is a strategic investment for IT – the cash for clunkers program that keeps on giving.
bryce
Merchant Accounts
Yeah, th governmnts program, cash for clunkers really helps the state to have more fuel efficient cars on the roads and remove those cost efficient ones. Every now and again, just about anyone could use a cash advance. Unexpected expenses happen, or sometimes you go overboard without realizing it, and that's when a cash advance could come in handy. Just as with using a credit card, using a cash advance loan is something that you have to do responsibly, and exercising responsibility if getting cash advance loans is something you have to do. Like any other form of financing, getting loans for emergency cash can go sideways if you aren't careful, and pay it back on time. Responsibility and caution are things to use in any situation, never mind just in getting a cash advance loan during times of trouble.