How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work? 302
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?"
Liquidate... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Eucalyptus (Score:4, Interesting)
Some ideas; (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
University (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
donate to non-profits (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:2, Interesting)
So, donate them to a charitable organization that can use them. My wife and I sit on the board of directors of two such organizations that would use them as webservers in a co-lo. Contact me for full details.
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Scaling soon? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't sell the equipment. If you have a colo you already do business with and a lot of extra server hardware, try subleasing it to someone you think might need some extra server capacity.
Sure, it's a lot of work to find customers, but with that much hardware sitting around you have a lot to offer.
Don't sell... (Score:2, Interesting)
Rainbow tables (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Liquidate... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd argue he should sell 16 and keep one for himself. While computers do rapidly depreciate in value, having a high-end server for home use can be nifty (so long as you keep it someplace where the noise won't bother you).
Start a web hosting service (Score:2, Interesting)
Just don't recycle them. People in china are dying because of the hazardous materials in electronic devices.
Donate to wikileaks, wikipedia, whatever (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ;)
Heating? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:1, Interesting)
He could always try to get them going as Rendering-Farm; or Compiler-Farm for OSS-projects/small distros.
extremetech.com [extremetech.com] gives some insight on the renderfarm idea.
sourceforge [sourceforge.net] about how to join the sourceforge distributed rendering network
Re:Self-employment (Score:5, Interesting)
Twenty thousand dollars investment in a startup on overpurchased server equipment isn't all that bad. You should figure that a company with a dozen people should be pulling about a $million/year gross, against which $20,000 to ensure sufficient delivery capacity is a pretty wise investment.
I figure that having at least 100%-200% additional capacity on-hand at all times is a good idea - computing power is relatively cheap, while the cost of downtime can be astonishingly high. Personally, I start upgrades when load averages approach 50% at the highest usage part of the day. (For me, about 10:00 AM)
That said, if the servers really aren't needed, every day they lose value. Put 'em up on Ebay and get what you can for them before they depreciate any further. Space them a few hours apart over a week or so, so that you don't depress their sale price.
Build machine for operating systems (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Set up an account at Seti or Folding with your companies name and start cranking stuff out. Move up the list and the www.yourwebsite.com team gets free advertising.
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
While the price of any specific item is influenced by multiple factors, the inflation of prices in general leading to a reduction in purchasing power is caused by an expansion of the money supply without a corresponding expansion in the supply of goods and services. While it is possible for inflation to happen with a static money supply as a result of a decrease in the overall supply of goods and services, this is rarely the case, leaving expansion of the money supply (printed and electronic) as the source of inflation.
Lowered interest rates affect prices in certain sectors. They do not affect "inflation" unless the economic definition of the term is misunderstood or intentionally misconstrued. Then again, economics is a soft science at best, leaving those involved to squabble endlessly about "facts" which are actually just conjecture lacking any sort of basis in controlled experiments. I guess that's why there are so many frauds and hacks in economics, since it's the perfect industry to make money in without actually contributing anything useful to society.
Re:Donate to At Home Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't sell the equipment. If you have a colo you already do business with and a lot of extra server hardware, try subleasing it to someone you think might need some extra server capacity.
Sure, it's a lot of work to find customers, but with that much hardware sitting around you have a lot to offer.
I was going to suggest the same thing. I rent a few servers from my favorite colo provider. I just keep paying them $60 per server until the end of time and they make sure the hardware works and I have connectivity. You could probably make a decent amount off renting them--or at least a better amount than the $0 you'd be earning with them in your garage. The downside is if you suddenly need them back. You'd have to give the customers fair warning to get their stuff moved to a new machine.
Donate them to a high school or CC (Score:3, Interesting)
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.