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I think that professional tier hardware generally comes with some sort of guarantees on how long they last, so data centers shouldn't be affected much.

by fouc 6y ago

teruakohatu 6y ago
There is a market for used cards. It is one way to get a relatively slow but high RAM compute card without paying extreme prices. Killing that market would force a lot of non-corporate users to start coughing up for extremely expensive new hardware.
me_me_me 6y ago
Thats correct. And it makes sense. If you buying HW in bulk, you take into account how much power it will draw, what's the expected life expectancy, how much work will given part do and not just the price. If you get an amazing price for part that fails often, it might cost you way more in long run.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  In general I would expect a bulk purchaser to be less sensitive to failure. If I'm buying one drive or CPU, I might pay a premium to drop the failure rate from 4% to 1%. If I'm buying dozens to hook together in a fault-tolerant system, I'll go for the cheap one and buy a few extras.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    When you buy 1000 CPU the failure rate of 4% every year. That gives you statistically 40 dead servers each year for 5 years (avg component guaranteed life). thats 200 dead cpus. Lets say $1000 per cpu thats $1,000,000 cost and $200,000 loss to damage. 1% - 50 dead CPU in 5 years - $50,000 in losses In this scenario you have $150,000 to save or spend to get better equipment. Also an important note. On top of that you suffer downtime losses and manpower cost of taking server out and swapping parts. If your eCommerce goes offline that might cause significant monetary loss. For any large scale purchases its all about the numbers game. In case of single purchases. Paying extra to get form 4% to 1% seems excessive (depending on the cost increase). At this percentage levels its a roll of dice if it dies or not.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      That wasn't supposed to be a per year failure rate. 20% per 5 years is a crazy amount. Divide the numbers by 5 to get a per-year failure closer to my intent. So if it's $850 for the 4% failure chip, and $1000 for the 1% failure chip, I'll probably buy the cheaper one in bulk. $850k upfront and $34k in replacement, vs. $1000k upfront and $10k in replacement. There's extra manpower, sure, but even if it costs a hundred dollars of labor per replacement the numbers barely budge. > downtime losses In a big system you shouldn't have those from a single server failure! Downtime losses are the point I was making. As someone buying just one drive or chip, failure costs me massive amounts beyond the part itself. But if I can buy enough for redundancy, then those problems become much much smaller. If you're running things off one server, then apply the single device analysis, not the bulk analysis.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
Most of the pro grade hardware does come with those assurances, usually with support and replacement contracts as well. And make no mistake, they may replace things a lot -- at my old gig we had a lot of visits from Dell. To Dell's credit, we had a LOT of gear to cover, in several different colo spaces. Point is though, they price the cost of replacement into those guarantees. Doesn't mean the hardware will last longer, just that support & replacements are

I think that professional tier hardware generally comes with some sort of guarantees on how long they last, so data centers shouldn't be affected much.

by fouc 6y ago

I think that professional tier hardware generally comes with some sort of guarantees on how long they last, so data centers shouldn't be affected much.

teruakohatu 6y ago

There is a market for used cards. It is one way to get a relatively slow but high RAM compute card without paying extreme prices. Killing that market would force a lot of non-corporate users to start coughing up for extremely expensive new hardware.

me_me_me 6y ago

Thats correct. And it makes sense. If you buying HW in bulk, you take into account how much power it will draw, what's the expected life expectancy, how much work will given part do and not just the price. If you get an amazing price for part that fails often, it might cost you way more in long run.

Dylan16807 6y ago
In general I would expect a bulk purchaser to be less sensitive to failure. If I'm buying one drive or CPU, I might pay a premium to drop the failure rate from 4% to 1%. If I'm buying dozens to hook together in a fault-tolerant system, I'll go for the cheap one and buy a few extras.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  When you buy 1000 CPU the failure rate of 4% every year. That gives you statistically 40 dead servers each year for 5 years (avg component guaranteed life). thats 200 dead cpus. Lets say $1000 per cpu thats $1,000,000 cost and $200,000 loss to damage. 1% - 50 dead CPU in 5 years - $50,000 in losses In this scenario you have $150,000 to save or spend to get better equipment. Also an important note. On top of that you suffer downtime losses and manpower cost of taking server out and swapping parts. If your eCommerce goes offline that might cause significant monetary loss. For any large scale purchases its all about the numbers game. In case of single purchases. Paying extra to get form 4% to 1% seems excessive (depending on the cost increase). At this percentage levels its a roll of dice if it dies or not.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    That wasn't supposed to be a per year failure rate. 20% per 5 years is a crazy amount. Divide the numbers by 5 to get a per-year failure closer to my intent. So if it's $850 for the 4% failure chip, and $1000 for the 1% failure chip, I'll probably buy the cheaper one in bulk. $850k upfront and $34k in replacement, vs. $1000k upfront and $10k in replacement. There's extra manpower, sure, but even if it costs a hundred dollars of labor per replacement the numbers barely budge. > downtime losses In a big system you shouldn't have those from a single server failure! Downtime losses are the point I was making. As someone buying just one drive or chip, failure costs me massive amounts beyond the part itself. But if I can buy enough for redundancy, then those problems become much much smaller. If you're running things off one server, then apply the single device analysis, not the bulk analysis.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

Most of the pro grade hardware does come with those assurances, usually with support and replacement contracts as well. And make no mistake, they may replace things a lot -- at my old gig we had a lot of visits from Dell. To Dell's credit, we had a LOT of gear to cover, in several different colo spaces. Point is though, they price the cost of replacement into those guarantees. Doesn't mean the hardware will last longer, just that support & replacements are