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Comment by shakil | Hacker News Reader

Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them.

In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the public cloud, where you can just spin down the VMs and stop paying for them. In your own data center, a server is already sunk cost that you cannot entirely eliminate just by shutting it down.

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  But the results have been dramatic. The company once had
  200,000 servers and roughly 60 data centers. Now, it's 
  pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 are 
  handling the bulk of the load. And they've more than 
  halved their data centers down to 23.

They say they save 25%-30% over the cloud, which is to be expected since the cloud has a profit margin. They also say that might not last.

I'm going with clickbait title. Nothing to see here other than someone getting a temporary savings which we will see as a write off in 5 years.

Is $15,000 per server normal?

I would imagine switches, firewalls, UPS, temp control, fixtures, and facility security are also significant cost factors.

Once you get into the TB range with memory and disk, and 64+ cores, easily.

Yes.

"Server" implies redundant power supplies, 4-?? disks, an excess of high quality capacitors, a heavy steel case, a motherboard probably 4x the area of a typical ATX motherboard, ECC RAM, far more RAM slot capacity, etc.

Furthermore, extended service contacts are the norm. Five year same day on site service isn't unusual. Five year 24/7 on call/next day replacement is typical. One year warehouse service is unheard of.

That's just the device itself. Servers also imply a rack to put them in, real estate for said racks, 24/7 HVAC for said real estate set to substantially below room temperature, and an expectation to run it (and consume electricity) continuously. You also need network architecture to support them.

This isn't even getting into the realm of stupid specced servers. 512GB RAM? Easy. 128 cores? Sure. Disk space, network capacity are cost limited: if your server is limited by network speed or disk capacity you can simply punt a briefcase full of money at your supplier and get more. You want all of that arbitrary capacity disk space to be SSD that's just an accounting problem.

When you are a large enterprise ordering from the likes of HP, $15k is a budget server. I'd see bills for "Hadoop nodes" that were $650k/rack.

A top tier Xeon CPU is $10k alone.

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