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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?"
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......
Have you thought about just selling the servers?
Just leave the garage door open for a few hours one night, and the problem will probably take care of itself. :)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
Even if he tried to do something profitable using them, between paying for power and bandwidth to operate them, it would have to be a real business model to even expect to break even in the modern economy of cheap professional server hosts. If there is a local university by you, I'd advertise trying to donate it to a local college or University with engineering/computer science programs. Often students just need academic clusters for the experience of parallel programming problems, and of course it could even help in minor actually useful research. And I'm sure they could help you work out a way to get some sort of tax recognition for the donation.
Have you thought about just selling the servers?
Let's say the 17 U1 servers cost 2,500 each. And let's say that selling them now would gain 1,250 each. That's 21,250 dollars available there.
Now let's say that Moore's Law continues to hold. And that you need the additional capacity when the economy makes a miraculous turnaround in 2 years. By that time, it should cost you less than 21,250 to get the same capacity back. And you would be doing it in half of the number of servers, which implies a space and power savings.
In that case, it is downright advantageous to sell now, buy back later. It all depends upon when you think you will need the capacity again. Too soon, and you will pay through the nose for selling. Too far away, and not selling now saddles you with old hardware.
Other options ---
If you're set on keeping them, I see only a few other options. One would be to see if any established small-to-medium sized businesses would like to lease the capacity of your servers. Perhaps those companies who sell time on private servers on video games could use them when the next one releases. Web hosting is probably a bust, but I wouldn't be surprised if a local university would be interested in leasing the iron for better rates than your garage pays. There is also cpushare.com and other cloud computing projects, but it doesn't seem like they're paying out at all.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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127.0.0.1
127.0.0.1
Oh my god, that moron is running SSH that gives me root access with the same basic password I use! Learn to use a Firewall or use a better password, n00b!
Here comes a big fat rm -rf / {#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER")
My work here is dung.