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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!
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......
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?
Somebody gets cheap hardware, your company gets more cash, the servers get used for something worthwhile...everyone wins.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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!
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank whoever coined the word 'Beowulf' as a very convenient shorthand form of 'I don't know anything about cluster computing, please disregard my opinion.' I can't begin to imagine how much time this has saved people over the years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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? :)
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.
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
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.
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
Porn ALWAYS pays.
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 ...
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
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 ;)
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
Step 1: Mirror NNTP server
Step 2: Create web page that offers service
Step 3: Create scripts that send out discs
Step 4: Profit!!!!
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
Where are your costumers coming from and when are they leaving
How did you know he works as a clown?
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!)
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