Understand the difference between TCO et TCA
When you buy servers, equipments, or softwares, the first question is “how much this cost ?”. The first approch is to say that it’s cost the price when I click on “buy” or when I give cash to the constructor. But, indeed, it’s not really true.
We will define what is the Total Cost of Acquisition and the Total Cost of Ownership. The first is the buy cost, what we just introduce, and the second is the buy cost with all the external costs (cooling, staff,..)
To be more clear, we want to buy 10 x86 servers to use as web cluster. TCA will be 10*500€, so 5.000€. For the TCO, we should add some other costs:
- Server electricity
- Servers cooling
- Infrastructure (floor space)
- Hire 10 employees
- Training your staff on clustering technologies
- Software and hardware installation
- Equipment insurance
- Cost of softwares
- Repair and daily check
- Downtime, outage and failure expenses
- ..
All these points are important, this is the TCO. When you have a project, you should think of the project cost on several years, not only the first day, when you buy servers. Some solutions can be expensive at the beginning, but can be cheaper on two years (low consumption ? low downtime ? small staff ?).