Green IT numbers don't lie - Sustainable IT, Ted Samson, InfoWorld 2008.05.15

Some interesting metrics on server operational costs... Indeed, the TCO is way higher (e.g. several hundred percent over a 3-year lifespan), than the hardware invoice ;-)

And the dollar figures, if they tend to follow gasoline, are only going up

Green IT numbers don't lie , May 15, 2008, Ted Samson, Sustainable IT, InfoWorld: "...$1,870 - The annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier ($2,500) server in a tier III datacenter. The number is $1,320 for a tier II datacenter, and it reaches $2,020 in a tier IV datacenter. According to the report, 'servers are often housed in a higher tier datacenter than necessary, further driving facility costs.' The point, of course, is that 'cheap' servers really aren't cheap at all, so the 'throwing hardware at the problem' approach isn't particularly sustainable..."