Quantifying the Total Cost of Ownership for Entry-Level and Mid-Range Server Clusters

Executive Summary The overall concept of Total Cost of Ownership for server clusters has been an important issue within the IT community for many years. Numerous studies and customer experiences have proven that purchase price alone is not an adequate measurement to compare server clusters from various vendors. Usually other factors, including the costs to manage and maintain the servers, as well as downtime, have a greater financial impact on an organization than just the system's purchase price. Recognizing these factors, TechWise Research developed an analytical approach in 1999 called Reliability-Adjusted Total Cost of Ownership TM that incorporates management costs and application availability in the TCO analysis. As part of this analysis, server clusters from different manufacturers are compared in terms of the actual number of downtime hours per year that customers typically experience. These downtime findings are then converted into a monetary measurement of the cost differences between clusters which TechWise Research refers to as the "Availability Advantage TM ." This study focuses on the following three brands of entry-level and mid-range server clusters: HP OpenVMS Integrity, IBM AIX System p5, and Sun Solaris Sun-Fire clusters. TechWise Research last studied these clusters in 2004. Since that time, HP, IBM and Sun have all introduced new server hardware as well as updated operating system and cluster software. These changes all have a direct impact on the Total Cost of Ownership for these clusters. TechWise Research conducted a new study, as a result, to provide more current information on this important topic. This study involves data from customers as well as publicly available pricing information. TechWise Research surveyed customers that have one of the three types of server clusters installed at their site. The purpose of these interviews was to collect data on the operational costs associated with installing, managing, and maintaining their clusters. Information was also collected on the number of hours and associated costs for various downtime events each company experienced over a twelve-month period. All of these operational data were then combined with current system and service pricing (from IDEAS International) as well as energy costs to calculate the Reliability-Adjusted TCO TM-an analytical approach that factors downtime costs/rates into the TCO analysis. TechWise Research included four main cost components in the TCO analysis. These are the costs to (1) buy the servers and service contract, (2) install and configure the cluster, (3) manage and maintain the cluster over …