> Our TCO includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co-location costs.
Which is a myopic view of TCO. This ignores so many things about purchasing on-prem hardware (for good or bad):
Admin:
- Cost associated with finding an admin who understands how this thing works
Speed / convenience:
- Try before you buy
- Time it takes for the box to be built, shipped and sent to the data center
- Time (and cost) it takes to install software, drivers, etc
Maintenance / Capitalization / Finances:
- 3-year? What is the useful life of this? When does it seemingly become obsolete?
- AWS will continually upgrade their hardware and you keep paying the same
- Hardware can be capitalized, which means you can push it to the balance sheet (for tax or valuation purposes)
- Spending $90k instead of $184k in year 1 with the option to turn it off if you want (no longer need). This could be very valuable for a startup who wants elastic spending patterns.
Hidden costs:
- Returns, breakage, warranty in case of a hardware failure
I understand why there is a market for this product, but it's not always an apples/orange comparison. Generally speaking, if you know what your workload is going to be, (I'd be hard pressed if a lot of orgs really know the answer to this) then on-prem hardware is not a terrible choice, but it has to be analyzed appropriately.
Which is a myopic view of TCO. This ignores so many things about purchasing on-prem hardware (for good or bad):
Admin:
- Cost associated with finding an admin who understands how this thing works
Speed / convenience:
- Try before you buy
- Time it takes for the box to be built, shipped and sent to the data center
- Time (and cost) it takes to install software, drivers, etc
Maintenance / Capitalization / Finances:
- 3-year? What is the useful life of this? When does it seemingly become obsolete?
- AWS will continually upgrade their hardware and you keep paying the same
- Hardware can be capitalized, which means you can push it to the balance sheet (for tax or valuation purposes)
- Spending $90k instead of $184k in year 1 with the option to turn it off if you want (no longer need). This could be very valuable for a startup who wants elastic spending patterns.
Hidden costs:
- Returns, breakage, warranty in case of a hardware failure
I understand why there is a market for this product, but it's not always an apples/orange comparison. Generally speaking, if you know what your workload is going to be, (I'd be hard pressed if a lot of orgs really know the answer to this) then on-prem hardware is not a terrible choice, but it has to be analyzed appropriately.