Cost-Benefit Analysis

• Performing a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-benefit analyses help you to

    Decide whether to undertake a project or decide which of several projects to undertake.

    Frame appropriate project objectives.

    Develop appropriate before and after measures of project success.

    Prepare estimates of the resources required to perform the project work.

Everything gets a dollar value in a cost-benefit analysis
Whenever possible, express benefits and costs in monetary terms to facilitate the assessment of a project’s net value.
Consider costs for all phases of the project. Such costs may be nonrecurring (such as labor, capital investment, and certain operations and services) or recurring (such as changes in personnel, supplies, and materials or maintenance and repair). I


Cost-benefit analysis: Weighing future values today
For example, you may expect to reap benefits for years from a new computer system, but changing technology may make your new system obsolete after only one year.
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/performing-a-costbenefit-analysis.html

• How to Do a Cost Analysis

A cost analysis (also called cost-benefit analysis, or CBA) is a detailed outline of the potential risks and gains of a projected venture.

1 Define your CBA's unit of cost  benefit
CBA measures literal cost in terms of money, but, in cases where money is not an issue, CBAs can measure cost in terms of time, energy usage, and more.

2 Itemize the tangible costs of the intended project.
Costs can be one-time events or ongoing expenses

3 Itemize any and all intangible costs.
Usually, CBAs also take into account a project's intangible demands - things like the time and energy required to complete the project.

4 Itemize the projected benefits.

5 Add up and compare the project's costs and benefits
we determine whether the benefits of our project outweigh the costs

6 Calculate a payback time for the venture

7 Use your CBA to inform your decision about whether to pursue your project
if it's not clear that a project can generate additional profit in the long run or pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time, you will probably want to reconsider the project or even scrap it all together.

Server Form Factors

• Server Form Factors

form factor refers to the size, shape, and packaging of a hardware device. Server computers typically come in one of three form factors:

Tower case: Most servers are housed in a traditional tower case, similar to the tower cases used for desktop computers.

Rack-mount servers are designed to save space when you need more than a few servers in a confined area. A rack-mount server is housed in a small chassis that’s designed to fit into a standard 19-inch equipment rack. The rack allows you to vertically stack servers in order to save space.

Blade servers: Blade servers are designed to save even more space than rack-mount servers
A blade server is a server on a single card that can be mounted alongside other blade servers in a blade chassis, which itself fits into a standard 19-inch equipment rack. A typical blade chassis holds six or more servers, depending on the manufacturer.
One of the key benefits of blade servers is that you don’t need a separate power supply for each server.
the blade enclosure provides KVM switching so that you don’t have to use a separate KVM switch.
With rack-mount servers, each server requires its own power cable, keyboard cable, video cable, mouse cable, and network cables. With blade servers, a single set of cables can service all the servers in a blade enclosure.v

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/network-basics-server-form-factors.html

Total Cost of Ownership

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an analysis meant to uncover all the lifetime costs that follow from owning certain kinds of assets. Ownership brings purchase costs, of course, but ownership can also bring costs for installing, deploying, operating, upgrading, and maintaining the same assets. For this reason, TCO is sometimes called life cycle cost analysis. For many kinds of acquisitions, TCO analysis finds a very large difference between purchase price and total long term cost, especially when viewed across a long ownership period.

1. Obvious costs in TCO analysis
Obvious costs in TCO are the costs familiar to everyone involved during planning and vendor selection, such as:

    Purchase cost:  The actual price paid.
    Maintenance costs: warranty costs, maintenance labor, contracted maintenance services or other service contracts
  
2. Hidden costs in TCO analysis

The so-called hidden costs are the less obvious cost consequences that are easy to overlook or omit from acquisition decisions

    Acquisition costs: the costs of identifying, selecting, ordering, receiving, inventorying, or paying for something.
    Upgrade / Enhancement / Refurbishing costs.
    Reconfiguration costs.
    Set up / Deployment costs: costs of configuring space, transporting, installing, setting up, integrating with other assets, outside services.
    Operating costs: for example, human (operator) labor, or energy/fuel costs.
    Change management: costs:  for example, costs of user orientation, user training, workflow/process change design and implementation.
    Infrastructure support costs:  for example, costs brought by the acquisition for heating/cooling, lighting,  or IT support.
    Environmental impact costs: for example, costs of waste disposal/clean up, or pollution control, or the costs of environmental impact compliance reporting.
    Insurance costs.
    Security costs:
        Physical security, for example, security additions for a building, including new locks, secure entry doors, closed circuit television, and security guard services.
        Electronic security, for example, security software applications or systems, offsite data backup, disaster recovery services, etc.
    Financing costs: for example, loan interest and loan origination fees.
    Disposal / Decommission costs.
    Depreciation expense tax savings (a negative cost).
http://www.business-case-analysis.com/total-cost-of-ownership.html

open hardware

• The servers themselves are 1.5U high, half again as high as the normal 1-U rack, Facebook executives said. That allows Facebook to build more space in the racks for cooling; the company used 60-mm fans to move more air with less power, they said. The racks are built on shelves, so they can be easily serviced.

Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester, claimed that the servers are divide into two categories: the Web tier, a high-power server that uses dual-socket, 8-core Xeon X5650 chips; and the Memcache tier, which uses less CPU, and more memory, and incorporates 8-core "Magny Cours" AMD processors, he said in a blog post. Each server can have up to 6 local disks.
The power supplies are more than 93 percent efficient, almost heard of in an industry where 90 percent efficiency is considered outstanding. For backup power, they use a modular 48V DC battery backup unit that supplies up to six servers through a DC-DC converter in each server. Each battery is connected via the network, so that the Facebook IT managers can monitor the health of the system.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383283,00.asp

• Why Open Hardware?

By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects.
http://www.opencompute.org/

blade servers

• A server architecture that houses multiple server modules ("blades") in a single chassis.

It is widely used in datacenters to save space and improve system management
Either self-standing or rack mounted, the chassis provides the power supply, and each blade has its own CPU, memory and hard disk

Diskless Blades
With enterprise-class blade servers, disk storage is external, and the blades are diskless.
This approach allows for more efficient failover because applications are not tied to specific hardware and a particular instance of the operating system.
The blades are anonymous and interchangeable
http://www.answers.com/topic/blade-server

• The Next Evolution of the Blade Server – External I/O Expansion

• Blade System Series Part-1

Chassis:- Consider this as a empty box with 8 to 10 unit in height which is the building block of the entire system.
BackPlane :- This component is assembled inside the chassis to provide high speed IO (input/output) path to Blade Server via I/O Bays.
Bays :- Consider this as a slot  where you can install blades. Bays can be customized to allow full/Half height blades installation or Mixture of both.
I/O Interconnect Bays :- These are again empty slots where you can install switches (Fiber or Ethernet) to connect Blade Servers with external Fiber or Ethernet networks. unlike rack servers which connects directly to Fiber or Ethernet network. Blade servers connects with High speed BackPlanes  which further connects with I/O Bays - and the switches installed inside I/O bays would allow further connectivity.
Blades:- Well, its the actual compute power which you install in bays. The reason they are called blades is because its highly dense in form factor and takes very less space

Having Management Module and I/O switches in every chassis increases Management as well as cabling that's why Cisco splits Management Module & I/O switches from the chassis
This design increases efficiency by sharing I/O switches with multiple chassis , which is not possible when switches are mounted inside the chassis. so lets understand this design with examples.
http://panksthought.blogspot.com.tr/2012/09/blade-system-series-part-1.html

• Blade System Series Part-2

Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System)
Having Management Module and I/O switches in every chassis increases Management as well as cabling that's why Cisco splits Management Module & I/O switches from the chassis

http://panksthought.blogspot.com.tr/2012/09/blade-system-series-part-2.html