Sun Fire X4450: Challenging the HP and IBM bastion

The Matter of TCO

TCO is probably the most talked about three-letter word in the IT industry. It is important we get an idea how much impact the hardware decision makes in the grand scheme of Total Cost of Operation/Ownership. In the first years of IT, the focus was mostly on TCA (Total Cost of Acquisition). However, the past years we have seen reports that are downplaying the initial buying costs. Since such papers were mostly sponsored by vendors of very expensive servers, we don't trust them either.

We decided to use numbers from two projects we have been involved with at our lab. In the first project, we had to implement a high availability solution with several servers (obviously) and shared storage. The direct impact of the hardware decision is the cost of buying the hardware and facilities (Cooling, Electricity and rack space). Training is usually a result of the software choices, but administration can be reduced by good serviceability. However, it is difficult to translate serviceability in hard currency, so we will not go into that detail.

According to our calculations, the impact of the hardware choices is at least 43%. This gives us a first data point. The next project is very different; it is a consolidation of a number of physical servers on two VMware ESX servers with shared storage.

You can see that - as in many cases - the software costs are taking the biggest bite out of your budget. In this case, the hardware choice has an impact of at least 26%. We believe it's reasonable to conclude that the hardware choice has an impact of about 30% to 45% of the costs of your IT services (not including development costs). That is quite important as we try to estimate how the Sun X4450 compares to the competition when it comes to TCO.