Total Cost of Ownership for Entry-Level and Mid-Range Clusters

Executive Summary The overall concept of Total Cost of Ownership for server clusters has been an important issue within the IT community for many years. Numerous studies and customer experiences have proven that purchase price alone is not an adequate measurement to compare server clusters from various vendors. Other factors, including the costs to manage and maintain the servers, as well as the application availability they provide, usually have a greater financial impact on an organization than just the system's purchase price. Recognizing these factors, TechWise Research developed an analytical approach in 1999 called Reliability-Adjusted Total Cost of Ownership TM that incorporates management costs and application availability in the TCO analysis. As part of this analysis, server clusters from different manufacturers are compared in terms of the actual number of downtime hours per year that customers typically experience. These downtime findings are then converted into a monetary measurement of the cost differences between clusters which TechWise Research refers to as the "Availability Advantage TM ." In the past year, the issue of data security and application availability has moved from the realm of the IT manager into the corporate boardroom. Several high profile viruses and worms resulted in excessive Internet traffic bottlenecks and downtime during 2003. For this reason, TechWise Research expanded its proprietary Reliability-Adjusted TCO TM technique to incorporate downtime caused by software viruses and worms. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that analyzes three leading RISC-based clusters on this important issue. This study focuses on the following three entry-level and mid-range server clusters: HP OpenVMS/ AlphaServer, IBM AIX/pSeries, and Sun Solaris/Sun Fire clusters. In the Fall of 2003, TechWise Research interviewed a total of 94 IT professionals in U.S. firms. The purpose of these interviews was to collect data on the operational costs associated with installing, managing, and maintaining their clusters. Information was also collected on the number of hours and associated costs for various downtime events each company experienced over a twelve-month period. All of these operational data were then combined with current system and service pricing (from IDEAS International) to calculate the Reliability-Adjusted TCO TM-an analytical approach that factors downtime costs/rates into the TCO analysis. TechWise Research included four main cost components in the TCO analysis. These are the costs to (1) buy the servers and service contract, (2) install and configure the cluster, (3) manage and maintain the cluster over three years, and, …