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How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work?
olyar writes "I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the 'we have plenty of money' phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do. The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well. So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"
The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS.
The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well.
You look like you're in a position to use virtualization to create X application servers over Y machine servers ... but you'd need all the IT staff and customer support, etc. to get that going. It's too bad you can't sell your CPUs to Amazon for their cloud computing since it's all pretty much anonymous but I guess either way I think about it you would need a pretty hefty internet connection.
Have you thought about just selling the servers?
My work here is dung.
Lots and lots of torrents from the empornium.
MABASPLOOM!
Pies are good. Especially pies.
Start competing with your employer. If they can afford to do whatever it is they do, and still just give away thousands of dollars in gear, there's obviously room for improvement.
Donate them to Pirate Bay. If nothing else, it will help them with the streaming video for their trial. :)
Or, you could run Crysis in software rendering mode.
Or rent it out to spammers, crackers, etc.
Seriously, though....you could probably rent out time on it to researchers for less than most supercomputer time costs. Especially since the hardware costs you nothing. All you have to pay for is power. Figure out how much it uses running full tilt, double or triple that cost, install Linux on the thing, and rent out CPU time.
Maybe you could even be part of the next big breakthrough in security research.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
nt = nice tunnels
If you don't have an immediate use, liquidate them while they still have value. IME, they will cost you hundreds to recycle later :-/... OTOH, they are a sunk cost to the business, so hanging on to them could be useful - if you think the business will need to scale up again at some point.
-Ghostis
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Leaving them outside Home Depot at 7 a.m. with a hungry look on their face?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of 1U servers.....
Can you donate them to schools?
The @home projects are quite worthy
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Somebody gets cheap hardware, your company gets more cash, the servers get used for something worthwhile...everyone wins.
Just use BOINC.
Set up a Eucalyptus installation and compete with Amazon. OK, not really, but you can have an EC2 workalike without the usage charges. Use this setup as a sandbox to test migrating your current IT infrastructure to AWS. When it all works, hit the switch and actually make the move to EC2. Then, sell your no-longer-used hardware. You just converted Capital Expenses into Operational Expenses.
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
Sell 'em .... really. You have no impending use for 'em, in a few years they won't be worth as much. Sell 'em and take the wife/girlfriend on a vacation, go on a vacation by yourself, pay extra towards your mortgage, credit card bills, etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Just install XP without any patches on them and hook them up to the internet without a firewall. I can assure you they will be fully utilized in short order.
If this were me i would hire them out to anybody who wanted the extra processor power for complex renders. Tha way they can pay for themselves and then some.
I guess the first thing you should do is study Just In Time Inventory so you wouldn't be in that situation.
However I would suggest that you use them to calculate business statistics for your company. Where are your costumers coming from and when are they leaving. What price ranges do they seem to like and dislike. BI is often better then intuition when solving business problems and some of that requires a lot of crunching.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I know I could probably make use of one of these boxes. It's a little stronger than the server I use now.
For the IT guy:
Start building clusters (great practice and fun). You can use the cluster many ways like a distcc 'box' (now you can compile Gentoo in less then a month!), or build a 'faster then real-time' video encoder/decoder.
For the Business guy:
Sell pre-made servers to local businesses. Using virtualization, create one image for 'basic domain/workgroup' that allows file & print sharing + email, and then it's simple to tweak the few config files per site.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
If you're virtualizing, you can prepare your extra hardware to host more virtual machines. Even if they're turned off, you can have your infrastructure prepared for rapid expansion.
You are virtualizing, right?
Another thought, eBay.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Just remember, to do anything useful, you'll need to pay Microsoft $20,000+ for a server operating system on all 34 servers. Oh, and don't forget all your CAL costs if you dare touch Active Directory in any form or fashion.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS
It's not a waste of FLOPS. There are plenty of spare MIPS and FLOPS in the world - witness the amount that get donated to folding@home, seti@home, various cipher cracking contests, etc. While you too could donate to those causes, I'd suggest against it - it's one thing to donate niced cycles of a machine that otherwise has to be running, but it's a tremendous waste of power to spin up that many boxes just to hand out cycles.
Recognize those servers for what they are - a waste of *money*. You sunk too much cash into a resource (and that's fine, no business has perfect foresight, and you had to anticipate potential needs). Now liquidate them and get your money out so you can spend it on something better than depreciation. If it turns out you need them in a year, I assure you you can buy servers for less $/FLOP from the liquidators at that time.
Donate it to a local university.
Or failing that, donate it to my university.
who knows, the tax writeoff might leave you better off then the cost of electricity to do something with it?
...and then email the login information to me.
Sorry, where do you live again? Seriously though, think of the power and cooling you're saving. In all honesty, sell them off to someone who can use the horsepower, and in return you get some hard to come by money. Simple.
Ive worked in non-profit IT and servers is one thing they always needed. They dont really need more hands at soup kitchens, they need equipment and expertise. I bet your local food bank would love that stuff. I also bet their existing servers are a couple of old non-raid desktops moved to a closet. You can probably just call someone at Feeding America and they would dole out the servers to deserving foodbanks via their grants system.
Also, if the businessman in you doesnt have a business plan then theyre just going to waste and will probably end up in a landfill. You might as well give them away to someone who needs them.
Beowulf Cluster! With that kind of power you can kick some serious bit ass. Netboot them all and set them up for a nice little side project, or setup a server farm to run your site. With that kind of power I don't know what I _wouldn't_ do!
This is not a viral sig. Copy it at your peril.
Beowulf, that is.
This is not a viral sig. Copy it at your peril.
one crazy idea would be to set up a compile farm for Linux, BSD, etc. Only make them do ads on them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not a single "Finally run vista and play crysis" post to be found.
1. co-lo servers
2. Start a pR0n website
3. Profit!!!
(no need for ???? step)
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
You never know...
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Before you decide to power them up in your basement research electricity costs. Whatever your dedicated cause may be I doubt it will be worth hundreds of dollars per month on your electric bill.
Suggestions :
Porn Site (plenty of space/processor for video rendering) ( helps get some income for the company)
Render Farm
Torrent Server
Use them for some hosting of local businesses and/or charities - again, helps get some income...
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
They don't appreciate in value. Virtualize the rest of your servers and sell the ones you free up from doing that too.
rooooar
If you have the spare hardware, racks to mount it in, and the juice to run it, why not build a test environment? Just replicate work and scale it out. Do the things you wish you could do at work. Then when the time comes you already have the future expansion plan ready to go. It may suck to even think about "work" after you get home from your day job. But if you like taking on big projects, why not?
"Texas"...well..."I've never seen that movie"...exactly!
The following comment only applies if you can put those servers back in a colo or some hosting facility. If you can't, you cannot use those servers. The noise, the heat, and the power requirements are too great to just put them in an office somewhere. Your company might be better off selling them and writing off the loss.
If you can put them in a proper facility, you should either be running VMWare ESX or Xen and then you should setup actual dev, test, and production environments that so many IT companies don't really have except for what individual projects have cobbled together. Do a staging environment too, if you're anal retentive. Then setup a build server (CruiseControl is the only one I know) to build from subversion and then setup your issue tracking system to deploy to new environments based on the proper approval from testers or managers. You will spend a lot of time building it at first and save many man years later on.
Fire the busboys and have the unused servers bus tables. The bottom line is that you ultimately have to increase patron traffic if you want your business to thrive. Have you considered businessman's lunch specials? Really hot hostesses? Maybe your cook sucks? Change your menu.
More music, fewer hits
Don't Sell. Unless you don't think you'll get the workload back for a very long time. You have a serious investment here... Have fun with it, and make it useful for the time being. Set it up to run any of the @home projects for now. Sell it all and loose your investment. Keep it, and you'll be set to keep your business flowing. I suggest Folding@home... seems to be the most worth while
You sure that one didn't get up and walk from your garage into your computer room? :)
Do you have any large, heavy doors that need to be propped open?
Create rainbow tables and charge a small fee for access. If you target M$ Office passwords, specifically the password to open, 40-bit RC4, target the possible keys because there are less possible keys than are possible passwords. See Ophcrack office, Rainbow crack office and Elcomsoft AOPB.
to utilize these servers to make you money is opening up a spamming business, but you aren't that evil, right?
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Those things probably cost $150-$200 a year to power 24/7, so you might want to consider is what you end up doing with them enough to justify the expense (if you're watching pennies, you need to watch every penny). I think I'm also of the opinion to 'sell now' while you can still get something of value for the machines. The cash you get now might help you through another month of operations, whereas keeping them around 'in the hopes we eventually get funding' is not really worth the effort.
Beowulf those servers.
Sell the CPU time. You'd be able to afford the electricity and heat your home from the servers alone. Then you'd also be making extra money to cool it in the summer and probably go buy yourself some space in a datacenter after a few weeks ;-)
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
SPAM SPAMMERS?! :P
hmm...
"Would you like to play a game of chess?
I play very well." HAL 9000
Or maybe Blinkenlights?
God, I'm old!!!
It's the perfect time to adopt a mad scientist. Seriously, how cool would this be to a Neural Net researcher? I honestly think you should put an advert out saying "looking for researcher to utilize private cluster with 272gb ram and 136 procs".
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Some of my servers that don't have much to do contribute to GIMPS
sell to the cloud, check out zimory
I could use some cheap compute servers for my new business.
Give someone at a local university a call and they will be happy to put a load on the servers.
Computational algebra and other fundamental fields don't get the large grants that the more applied fields get so they are always looking for more computing power on the cheap. 8GB RAM per processor is also a minimum for many of the calculations since group sizes can grow very fast.
1) Make a copy of the hard drives ...?
2) Erase hard drives
3) Create a listing for the servers on ebay
4) Create a listing for confidential company data
5)
6) Profit
A powered on server costs your company money; it uses power to run. Power costs money. Having it powered off costs less. If you power up the server, you may also pay a cost to keep it cool; you air conditioning system has to work harder drawing more power.
If the server will not be used, you may want to sell it and stop paying rent on the storage space for the server.
It could possibly be the most lucrative income for your start-up for a little while, and it's way easier to implement then some of the other ideas presented here. All you need to purchase is a small block of IP addresses and a domain name. Assuming that you already have fast network hardware.
Just don't recycle them. People in china are dying because of the hazardous materials in electronic devices.
find a way for them to profit from your hardware and you'll be the ./-all-time-hero.
Investigate viability of a 3D Render Farm business.
People doing 3D work don't need this kind of iron to design and animate; they only need it for final render. Makes sense to rent time on it.
There are business out there doing this now - don't know if anyone's made a success of it.
Use ebid.net instead. Lower fees, less BS.
Buying computers is a cost sink. You buy computers and amortize the cost of them over a few years. You ONLY buy computers because you need to do computing work.
If you don't need the computing power, sell off 90% of them at a great price (maybe 20% below market value), RIGHT NOW. Holding onto depreciating assets with no return on them is no better than tossing money into a furnace.
Keep a couple of 'em around for growth, spares, and new projects. Sell the rest, and when you need the computing power, buy something 'x' times faster for the same amount of money.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I can't believe I'm the first to say
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of those"
at least at my company, compiling things always takes forever. if you take a few of those systems (some to all) and cluster them together, you can construct a powerhouse cluster capable of compiling things significantly faster than anybody's laptop. give your engineering team (and your power users) shell access to the cluster and set it up to (cross-)compile for whatever laptops and servers you have and watch everybody become more productive.
this can also be worked into good extra-curricular skill building, as people start to toy around with the system and write less-efficient code in order to get stuff done faster, then later tweak that code into more usable structures for production use. tons of opportunity there.
within IT, you can also use a few of them as spare servers for staging crazy new projects, like (for example) if you're considering Zimbra vs Scalix vs Kolab vs OpenExchange for mail solutions, you could implement them ALL without much worry. since your hardware is likely all identical, you would be able to create a base install and just copy it 16 times, affording you the ability to wipe systems and revert to a fresh install every time. just be sure to re-generate your ssh keys.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Porn ALWAYS pays.
"if only I had a beowulf cluster of those" will suddenly become more than a FP catchphrase.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Your local High School or college film/media/art department would love to have access to your render farm. Some programs which can take advantage of it include Blender, Art of Illusion, Hash, Bryce, Carrara etc
If you dont have a pressing need, why bother powering them up? Theres a reason $job pulled them from the colo. Im sure they are hungry heat-factories. Keep that green in your wallet when its time to pay the monthly power utility bill and just dont power them up.
And if youre not going to spin them up, punt them to someone who needs/wants them while they still have some value before Moore renders them useless ...
they draw too much power.
Your machines are underutilized and, with luck, you too soon will be!
Make them wash dishes.
Regardless of what you do as far as utilizing the servers, call your insurance agent straightaway and make sure that equipment is insured! Business property is very unlikely to be covered by your homeowner's policy so theft/fire/whatever could leave you financially exposed (or even liable, should the investors choose to come after you for reparations).
give them to me
sell them to companies as backup servers fire hits there server room they call you disaster averted there's another word for these buisnesses i forget
or you could set up an internet hosting company
or if you ever play any online rpg most guilds use ventrilo probably won't be able to get enough buisness to use up all those extra cycles doing that though
I thought of this b/c wikileaks (http://wikileaks.org/) seems to be in dire need of money or servers right now. I am sure you can think of other non-profits that could use that kind of hardware (open source projects, maybe?). You don't seem to *need* the cash if you're asking this question on /., so maybe now is the time to do some good ;)
I could use two for parallel programing. I am just starting in college, and the servers are always in use. Not to mention there are only two parallel server and 50 of use.
Pr0n farm
As an IT professional currently working for a medium sized non-profit company, I can say that most if not all non-profit agencies would be more then happy to accept them as donations and be more then happy to also pay for the shipping of the items. You get a tax write off, and don't have to pay to ship them, and the non-profit gets some decent servers to help run their agencies. IANATA (I Am Not A Tax Accountant) but I'm pretty sure the value of the item is what it would cost to buy a new one identical to the unit now. Generally the person donating sets the value of the item for the receipt you would receive.
ps I'd be happy to take some of them. :)
The Man in Black
they have tons of data to process !
It takes a decent amount of electricity to run that much hardware.
A 2KW setup of machines (all crunching numbers) could heat up a room as efficiently as a 2KW electric heater, so why not use it in this way? You could even make a climate control that starts/stops @Home-processes to get a constant room temperature. Sounds fun (and a bit nerdish).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
On the top of the page a Google-ad says that its the best time to buy Intel Xeon based IBM servers. Go buy some more to add to your collection :)
It can be really interesting to setup honeypots like this and watch what happens... may be a sign I have too much time on my hands.
Please? :)
Or computer section or parallel processing group at the university.
A local business provided us with 40 servers and two head nodes we're actively setting up as a student group for running parallel processing labs, as well as for student group and student activities.
We'll be running renderings for design competitions and genetic simulations of aerofoils to name a few things we've found to do with them.
Also, they got a tax write off from it.
There are many companies like NewServers.com and Amazon selling servers at very low prices (at least newservers) by the hour. There's no possibility of you being able to compete with them in any way and without their software management infrastructure. So leasing these servers like a traditional hosting company or selling hourly usage like many have suggested means competing in a very cut-throat and capital intensive industry.
Sell them TODAY on ebay with a starting bid of $1...
Although I like some of the previous answers, another option would be to provide your own virtual world (Ã la' Second Life) or join with one of those starting up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator
Either sell them, or donate them for a helluva tax deduction. In this economic climate, I doubt you'd be able to cobble together an effective business that would use the hardware (no offence), and having them sit in storage is an utter waste.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
http://ai-0.net/
What, maybe 15 seconds at the outside?
And now I know what he must do. He must set up a virus network.
... why not give them to somebody else who can use them? Why not sell them on Craigslist or eBay or, if you're in a really giving mood, give them away on a local freecycle group? You could also donate them to some charitable cause that needs some computing power, then take the donation as a tax write-off... which it sounds like you might be needing down the road a bit.
Sure, if you're heating your house with electricity anyway, might as well have the stuff doing some computation for you, at least in the winter. Obviously it's different in the summer...
With all the churn of the last few years of oil prices, I don't know how electric heat compares to oil or gas heat (my last data point was 15 years ago, when heating my all-electric high-ceilinged condo in Silicon Valley at California's "regulated" electricity prices cost more than oil heat for my moderately-well-insulated house in New Jersey, where we actually had winter...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sell most off em off, but please donate a few to your favorite distro (Debian will gladly take some of those off your hands, the BSD's would love them too)
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
My friends at Pirate Bay tell me there's good money in that racket...
Donate them to Debian project
http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090208
Move them from the garage to your living room and use them to heat your home?
Set up a Newsgroup server and start a side business sending out DVD disks of specific files on the NTP servers. For instance: I want Hot.Amateur.part01.rar - Hot.Amateur.part200.rar You have them hosted on a server. I pay $$$ for the disk through a website. You have a script that auto burns the files onto dvd (in rar format) it poops it out at the end of the day. You send the disk to me in a sealed envelope and there you are. You can get the envelopes from UPS, generate labels on a desktop machine and there you are. Or even better, a raw mirror on disk. You send out a drive full of alt.binaries.whatever for $100 a piece (assuming you use hotswappable $60 drives). Another idea would be cluster services. I'm sure somebody would pay good money for ssh access to that much raw processing power to decrypt passwords or something. That's practically a super server farm waiting to happen.
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
Well, with no purpose they are basically just depreciating in value quietly in your garage (our loudly and expensively if you have them on). Considering all the fun stuff you could do with a server like that you might want to hang on to one a or two of them, but get rid of the rest.
Not only would it cost a fortune to run them, but chances are the electrical in your house isn't up to the job anyway. All of them running would be a nightmare of extension cord tangles and tripped breakers. Selling is one option, but who knows how soon they will sell and for what price? There are no guarantees. If you donated them, you could get a hefty tax write off and be sure they are being put to good use.
Universities are a good place to off load them to. Anywhere with a computer science department is always in need of good hardware. May I suggest Kettering University? Our hardware is more then out of date and the CS department is far to small to get the funds to improve it. Kettering Computer Science Department
Rent them out for use as gaming pcs. Could be fun (if you like to game yourself) and might even cover your costs.
Quack, quack.
You can check with Computer surplus, they buy used servers and computer equipment. check them out:>> http://www.surpluscomputers.com/
Seriously. It will save the costs of powering them. Our networking research lab is in desperate need of modern machines -- it's hard to get funding these days to update our equipment. The other groups in our CS department could really make use of it as well... I could even arrange pickup/delivery (we're on the US east coast). Contact me if you're interested.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
On that note I've got an IBM eServer 325 which I bought and will probably never use. I guess I could just donate it, since nobody seems to want to buy it.
Have you tried Freecycle?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The MusicBrainz project could use them, and you get a tax write-off.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Free operating systems like OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD continously need to compile their ports tree in order to make snapshots available for download and testing.
Compiling the whole tree takes quite a long time, especially with piece of software like OpenOffice.org. The currently can't build snapshots as often as they (and user) would like to.
Some other projects like Drizzle and GCC are also looking for remote build machines for regression testing.
Your unused servers can really help the open source community.
{{.sig}}
It never ceases to amaze me when startups begin by spending a LOT of money. The key to starting a business w/o a lot of financial backing is to spend the LEAST you possibly can until you have a solid income.
Why on earth would you burn cash on servers? In our startup we're just using Amazon's EC2 until we need something else. Its basically a fancy hosting service. And we only pay for what we use.
If/when the product is up and running, and the business grows, and Amazon ceases to be useful, then we'll think about investing in expensive hardware!
I think all this free VC cash mentality is very harmful for businesses. What ever happened to making money the old fashion way... and then selling the business once it has proven itself? The VC route is basically the lottery route.
I believe a business should require a small investment and then pay for itself.. and as it proves its potential it gets funded more.
(that's basically how my other business works.. though it basically funds itself because its PROFITABLE!)
Those servers, even in idle, would use lots of power. Think green and don't waste energy when it's not necessary.
Set it up as rentable server space. Lord knows its expensive enough. In a year or two, provided you have enough customers, you might pay of the cost. Hell, your boss would be pleased if it works. Just make sure you do it legally. I don't know where you live.
Sounds like you'll be able to run Vista properly now.
SETI @Home or the protein folding app IMO. And put them in your basement so the electricity helps heat your house.
Sell them and let the invisible hand decide what is the best way to use these machines.
Levon Barker
http://www.cpushare.com/
Allthough it seems, that nobody is willing to pay these days.
Sell half of them, and buy a truckload of coke and doritos, install Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, Urban Terror and Call of Duty on the others. Buy a catheter and lock the door...
Suggesting that he apply supply chain methodologies to this problem is misapplied knowledge.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Memcache. Seriously, if you're an internet company, you can never have a fast enough webpage. throw memcache on the machines and start caching the crap out of your site and ease some load off your database.
Find some underfunded community college, then find a department that wants to get their feet wet with a cluster.. get on good terms with whoever they make the admin..
Donate it with some provisos... that you get access to the machine. and that your not going to use it for illegal or buisness activities.
Dont give it to IT..
your giving people the chance to learn to use a cluster.. and you can play around on it anytime without a power bill.
And it can give you a nice online storage capability via ssh/scp/sftp
Storm
I manage a not for profit medical research institutes IT - were always looking for more gear to run genetic comparisons n clustered processing. getting $$$ to buy hardware is a major slog and funding for computer hardware is very scarce.
I'm sure that some scientist out there would cream his jeans if you were to donate them.
just a thought,... cause were trying to get a 48processor 20TB cluster with around 30k AUD?!?!?
we need a new exchange server so.......
Donate them to your local schools. If they don't want them I'll be happy to find some low wealth NE Ohio schools that would hug them and love them. My school runs on donated and refurb hardware. Many schools do. And...... there's a tax benefit!
Set up a Left4Dead server on one.
Find out if any open source projects, like Wesnoth, could use a beefy server. Give it away. (They'll probably mention it, which is free advertising - though it probably won't translate into real money)
Sell most of the rest and re-purchase later if required.
Keep 2-4 of them in case your capacity requirements suddenly jump x%, or a server goes down.
Now your talking money.
Put up an Urban Terror game server. Make your own maps w/advertising.
Beats letting them gather dust while reaching a quick obsolescence.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
How much did they cost? When did you buy them? How much are they worth now. How much can you earn from using them? how much do they cost to run?
Add up all the costs, over 12 months, 24 months, 36 months. Add up all the potential revenue they'll earn.
If the first is bigger than the second, you're losing money - sell them now for as much as you can, cut your losses. If the revenue is bigger, you might consider using Net Present Value (look up the NPV function in your favorite spreadsheet) to determine if it's really a profit. If the NPV is negative or zero, sell. Only if the NPV is postive , and by more than a fistfull of dollars, AND you're confident about the numbers should you hang on to them.
Or can you donate them to a charity, and write them off for tax?
Rant: given that performance / price ratio is constantly improving, why would anyone ever ever ever buy hardware a second before they absolutely have a proven need for it to earn a buck? That's like buying fuel, and letting it evaporate in the desert sun.
Hmmm clustered DVD archival...
Donate the cpu's to academic research and grid computing research by running Nereus on them. http://www-nereus.physics.ox.ac.uk/
Make it available as a render farm for the blender guys or other open source/independent game/movie makers
I just can't be bothered.
This is one of those things that is obvious, but took a while to actually sink in. I was brought up to never just throw something out, because you might find some use for it in the future. It took me a long time to realize keeping something in the closet unused is just as wasteful as discarding it, especially if it is something that depletes in value (as in usefulness not just money) over time.
It is much better to find someone who will use it now, even if that takes a little more work on your part. And you might even get a little money back for your effort.
as will your power bill.
eBay is your best recourse to putting these boxes to work.
It is very hard to justify all that wasted power by running so many inefficient boxes (how efficient are the PSs? A single, larger box would be more efficient (that's why small, under-powered servers like this are so cheap on the used equipment market)...
Ken
I bet you can think of some open-source projects that could use some server hardware. I'd pick ones whose software I personally use, if it were me. Let's see... I use Emacs and Gnus, so if it were me I'd probably ask the people in charge of those projects if they could use a couple of 1U servers. Oh, and Debian. And the OpenSSL/OpenSSH folks. I use Firefox a lot, but they've got enough money for their hardware needs, due to their deal with Google. Wikipedia's needs are too large for the small amount of hardware you're talking about to even matter, so skip them too. Does the Apache foundation need hardware, or are they pretty well taken care of? Oooh, what about the Perl dev team, or the CPAN folks? You get the idea.
I mean, if you've got a better use for the hardware, sure, do that. It's your hardware, after all. (Or does it still belong to the startup? You didn't say so, and it's in your garage, so I kind of assumed not...) But if it's going to end up just sitting in a garage until it's too obsolete to be worth anything, hey, why *not* donate it?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
wanna hand them out? :D ;)
I've seen a lot of posts for the obvious: Charity, sell the system, blah, blah, blah!!!
What you need to ask yourself (if you REALLY want to make money) is: What would Dr. Evil do?
Sounds like that would be one mean Counter-Strike server.
Get into a new business: Sell collocated virtualized machines and network bandwidth.
-Matt
Large companies always abandon machine once the warranty expired, but these machines are still powerful for non-critical tasks, like personal blogs, even start-up companies,too. if most companies, in various reasons, have machines to get rid off, i would like to start a business.
Build them as Alarm sensors for business and have the central console. Send the businesses alerts about their hardware when they have issues and charge for the service.
Use them to save Planet Earth by never turning them on. You will also save $$$ on your power bill!
What kind of number crunching is going on at the soup kitchens and food banks that requires 17 servers??
Besides, the electricity bill would shut down their operation.
but I want in, too!
Seriously, I could use a few server boxes. I am trying to put together a server for a genealogical database.
Many school districts / schools are dying for any type of fairly recent technology - not some Pentium II or III crap or your old 20" CRT.
Tech classes can use PCs or servers. Get this --- we are in a large (38000 students) district that is fairly well connected etc. --- yet the district only provides our entire high school (2000 students) with 20GB of server space. Of course we have 37 schools + offices so they are pushing a terabye of data.
I'm building Linux servers out of clapped-out Pentium IV's and 160gb hard drives to augment student storage of large digital projects.
Its not the years, its the mileage
Why are their servers in your garage?
Check out HiperWall technology:
http://www.hiperwall.com/technology.html
Poke around the literature--this technology came from UC Irvine Calit2 research center between 2005 & 2008. There's a primitive overview at:
http://hiperwall.calit2.uci.edu/?q=node/26
Donate to Debian and let everyone benefit.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
I recently landed in the same situation (except mine came with a full HP cabinet!).
Now people hate me a little less for being a Gentoo user, because I can
update my system in 2 hours instead of 3 days. >_>
Thanks to the magic of distcc
Another fun thing to do is use the build farm as a transcode cluster (for making DivX).
I just fire it up whenever I need it.
A lot of scientific and/or Open Source projects would probably be very happy to get server hardware like that. Pick out a handful or two of projects that you enjoy, have enjoyed in the past, or just find important, and ask them if they want any of it - they'll most likely be very happy!
If you have to keep them on, I suggest using them for a distributed project like folding@home.
Another option is to sell/lease them to a hosting company or provide cheap rates to start-ups.
You have a bunch of servers doing nothing but losing value at a rate of 20 to 30% a year and inviting theft. These things are going to be obsolete by the time you need them.
Ebay them as fast as possible. When you need servers buy servers with the cash.
made by communities -
pclinuxos
mint
damnsmall
nimblex
puppy
KDE and all the other DEs
Offer services to programmers to test out distributed DB systems and stuff with Amazon Data Sets
Not SETI, please!
And not Folding@Home!
There are better things to do with those.
There are some really cool opensource Windows projects too that need servers for building and testing
Start a local Zonbu-like thin-client-based WAN
Your own small "cloud service" for your town or neighborhood.
Build Linuxes for the smaller distros - those guys put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears and give for free.
SMALL DISTROS, #1 priority.
The guys at Zimory have an interesting concept: they allow you to publish your hosts to their public cloud. You can get an income from the utilization of your servers. This is the idea behind Zimory - allow data centers to earn an income from their unutilized servers. Checkout their website.
I'm surprised that no one seems to have suggested VMWare. ESX will allow you to create one big VM host with your servers which would be the perfect platform for hosting a ton of smaller sites. Not only would it allow you to take advantage of all the system resources, it would have the added benefit of being able to seamlessly move hosts to other hardware in the 'cluster' to allow for maintenance.
1. ebay.com 2. you can contribute to some business in some poor country and get some shares.
Keep 5 dual core machines for yourself, easily fits in your den, and cluster them....
the rest sell to friends and relatives at a steal, and make profit.
The tor project could always use some more nodes.
foldingAtHome and seti get a lot of attention, but it's find of fun to join the willy-waving* contest at distributed.net's rc5 key-cracking test.
:-(
whenever we buy in a load of new servers, I do a quick burn-in test and fire up the key cracker to see how well the CPUs perform at basic math; a couple of months ago I managed to get to the number 11 spot using 30 machines each with dual Xeon L5420 processors. I'm hoping that our next order, probably 50 to 60 servers of higher spec, will allow me to break through into the top 6, but to get to number 1 you'd have to be google or amazon
* as in, "I've got more CPUs than you, yah boo sucks" type of boasting game
What about linking them all up and participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or the SETI program, or I know there are also other parallel processing applications contributing to cancer research or other important issues.?
Are your sure you aren't Dr. David P. Anderson from the Boinc project?
You probably could get some kind of tax deduction by donating cycles or servers to some distributed computing charity.
I'll trade you one for my IBM 44P-170. It will be a collector's item someday.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
www.ebay.com
Well, I wouldn't do this for money, because I'm not that kind of guy... but I'd burn a bunch of ClusterKNOPPIX CDs / DVDs (or whatever the useful equivalent is nowadays) and have them work on cranking out HD videos of winners of the past Internet Raytracing Competitions from the past decade or so.
http://www.irtc.org/
You could send a couple of them my way, for, ummm, safekeeping....
You could write off $21k of your taxable income by donating these to schools.
Oh my god. Who is the moron CFO of that company??? What downstairs business school did they go to?
Buying so many servers is retarded! If anything they should have leased them or rented-to-own. If I were an investor I would definitely come after someone.
Have you thought about posting a few of them on e-bay and setting up a website for leasing the rest? Look around at what other leasing companies are charging and just charge less. Then, phone up a few telecoms and such and offer them a lease on some servers.
you can build a pretty sweet ramp to jump your bike with those
Find local or close by animation houses and sell the processor time to the animators. They always need more processor time for any of their attempts at processing things.
Slowly and surely the Linux crept up on the Nintendo
...okay, smack me.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Setup counterstrike 1.6 servers and pwn the n00bz
What ever you do with them, it should make money to at least cover the power consumed and depreciation expense. If not, you may want to consider selling them. I know I wish I were in your position because I could the money.
Maybe Vista would work on a Beowulf cluster of those!
No sig for now.
I'm a start-up web developer/consultant and i could use a server or two, or maybe just rent some of yours.
Here is a proxy email webmaspro at gmail dot com
through that we can get in touch initially. Thanks
-R
If you say you have a business man in you, why don't you advertise for local website hosting for local businesses? I am guessing if you are a server admin with an internet company you may even know how to build websites? Maybe advertise to these companies about your exp and throw together a wesbite that would satisfy the needs of the company and just host it locally. Then maybe advertise to business companies for local data back up? That could thow you some extra cash and just be a small web admin in your free time.
And then second like somebody said up there run it for seti or any of those @home projects. Sounds like you ahve plenty of processing power.
EC2 is still too expensive.. Though very nice if you need three servers with 64GB for a couple of weeks..