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How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work?

Posted by timothy on from the what-does-your-inner-ringmaster-say? dept.

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?"

9 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Donate to At Home Projects by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Donate to At Home Projects by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Um....wha? Inflation is a measure of price levels. Period. Inflation can be CAUSED by the government (Well, actually the central bank) printing money or lowering interest rates, but it is certainly not "based entirely upon the rate at which the local country prints money."

      Inflation is the decrease in purchasing power of a given monetary amount. So you are correct. And yet inflation is measured by taking a weighed average of various commodities, and there's lots of factors that can depress the price of those commodities aside from the money supply, including drop in demand due to loss of consumer confidence or excessive leveraging.

      It's a little bit like the opposite of the stock dilution that happens when executives are paid hundreds of millions of dollars. That detracts from the share value of other stakeholders. Traders really should be paying attention to that when they buy or sell shares, but as long as the company is growing investors tend to overlook it. When the company revenue drops 10%-20% and profits dive into the red, shareholders take notice that executive compensation is that high.

      A substantial loosening of the money supply by a central bank causes inflationary pressure. If the economy is growing, with new products and services being offered in addition to the old ones, prices would naturally drop because more is being produced but money is scarcer - you want to increase the money supply to counter those pressures and so that money is available for new investment rather than tied up in short term purchases. Inflationary pressures from the printing of money may currently be bottled up by the recession and by the fact that a lot of money is tied up in toxic securities. The tightened credit (due to money being tied up in bad securities) prevents growth that could allow the value of those properties to be slowly regained. If those securities become viable again, through somebody taking a loss for the value correction (be it the investors or the homeowners or both), then their value re-enters the monetary system (people can borrow against those securities or sell them to someone else).

      If nobody is willing to take the loss now, they'll just take it in the long run. While the deflation of the housing bubble will eventually stop (though it could still fall further), there are so many affected mortgages that the oversupply of housing compared to available credit could mean decades before property values can climb back to the mortgaged amount. The mortgage security owners stand to lose the most because repossessed properties would have to be sold at below-mortgage-value distressed prices.

      Property owners are better off walking away from the loans if they have limited equity buildup (which most wouldn't with only a few years post-purchase). They'll take a hit on their credit rating but they would probably recover faster from that than it would take for their property values to do the same, and during that time period they could save money to start again.

      When property values recover to the point that the securities become viable again, the money that's currently tied up will become loose again. It will be initially slow, but the inflation will accelerate the process of increasing property values, which will free up more money tied up in those securities, further increasing inflation, and so on in a positive feedback loop until all the mortgage securities become viable again. The inflationary pressure that has been masked by deflationary pressures from a shrinking market will get released. While you'll get some real GDP growth as well as other sectors of the economy recover, the pent-up inflationary pressure from years of deficit spending will far outstrip it.

      In the 90's, most economic sectors in the US were in a recession, but it was masked by the dot-com bubble. When the dot-com bubble burst, the ongoing recession was quickly revealed. This is similar: the inflation from TARP is there, it's just being overshadowed by the deflation from the housing crisis and credit crunch. If the housing crisis gets resolved and the credit crunch eases up, then that pent-up hidden inflation will spring to the fore.

    2. Re:Donate to At Home Projects by MyrddinBach · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://themostboringblogintheworld.wordpress.com/2006/09/13/worlds-worst-hacker-irc-transcript/

  2. Re:Self-employment by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I heard a similar story at one company I worked at. An IT manager ran an ISP off the spare capacity of the server farm and bandwidth for years before someone in higher management ordered an audit. Needless to say, he ran south to the border (no, it wasn't Taco Bell).

  3. Re:donate to non-profits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Donate to Debian! see #9 on http://debian.org/intro/help

  4. Re:Donate them. by allenofmn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Or better yet donate them to someone who really needs them. I am a sys admin at a university chapter of the association of computing machinery. We recently suffered a tragic loss of several of our servers. Being an NPO, a donation would be tax deductible.

  5. Freecycle by falconwolf · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?
  6. Donate them to the MusicBrainz project by Matt+Perry · · Score: 2, Informative

    The MusicBrainz project could use them, and you get a tax write-off.

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    Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
  7. Re:Donate them. by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Informative

    That can't compete with a cluster of playstations

    On both cost and power consumption, the playstations beat the crap out of intel chips when it comes to numeric analysis.