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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.
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.
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 $/FLOP from the liquidators at that time.
Ive worked in non-profit IT and servers is one thing they always needed. They dont really need more hands at soup kitchens, they need equipment and expertise. I bet your local food bank would love that stuff. I also bet their existing servers are a couple of old non-raid desktops moved to a closet. You can probably just call someone at Feeding America and they would dole out the servers to deserving foodbanks via their grants system.
Also, if the businessman in you doesnt have a business plan then theyre just going to waste and will probably end up in a landfill. You might as well give them away to someone who needs them.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank whoever coined the word 'Beowulf' as a very convenient shorthand form of 'I don't know anything about cluster computing, please disregard my opinion.' I can't begin to imagine how much time this has saved people over the years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fire the busboys and have the unused servers bus tables. The bottom line is that you ultimately have to increase patron traffic if you want your business to thrive. Have you considered businessman's lunch specials? Really hot hostesses? Maybe your cook sucks? Change your menu.
More music, fewer hits
Create rainbow tables and charge a small fee for access. If you target M$ 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
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).
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
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.
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