Comment by bourbonproof
9 days ago
doesn't this imply that they buy massive hardware and thus replace their hardware constantly? At what rate? It seems the rate is massive. I'd gladly use a 4year old server for the old price.
9 days ago
doesn't this imply that they buy massive hardware and thus replace their hardware constantly? At what rate? It seems the rate is massive. I'd gladly use a 4year old server for the old price.
Then check out the Serverbörse https://www.hetzner.com/de/sb/ that's exactly what you're asking for. Used servers, some of them with Skylake (2015) processors, some even with Haswell (2014) processors.
Hetzner keeps running the old machines as long as they can find customers for them, which means they have entire buildings of 10+ year old machines still running.
> thus replace their hardware constantly?
Yes? How else do you think it works? At scale, hardware breaks all the time and must therefore be replaced all the time.
This is true even at Hetzner's scale.
It's not even the reliability which is the issue. Newer servers can put hundreds of cores in one physical machine, while taking up the same amount of rack space and using the same amount of electricity as older systems with tens of cores.
How long do you want to run something that uses 3x the electricity for the same level of performance when you're buying power by the megawatt? How about the even older ones that use 10x as much?
Yes that's a thing too, but it's a question of cost and potential revenue. So if replacement hardware is really expensive then maybe you make the inefficient stuff hang out longer, as long as it's not broken and you have paying customers.
But at some point hardware does break and if you're going to keep the datacenter open for business you'll need to address turnover of inventory on an ongoing basis, and if you haven't locked in long-term deals for hardware then you'll have to bear current market prices when you do that.
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The lowest prices are for hardware much more than 4 years old though: take OVH's Kimsufi, they use CPUs that first launched in 2015, 2017, 2018, ...