Congratulations! You’re finally ready to host your own applications on your own hardware. You’ve spent a few thousand or tens of thousands on state-of-the-art servers, bought the best components, purchased your software and licenses, and built a great IT support team to manage it.
That’s it right? I’m done paying for this server…right?
Not by a long shot. Managing your own hardware comes with a slew of hidden costs most companies never consider. Costs can skyrocket quickly if you’re not extremely experienced and knowledgeable of the enterprise server world. Here are some of the hidden costs associated with buying and managing your own hardware.
1. End-of-Life Products – if you’re not tuned in to what your server’s manufacture is doing, you may be buying a product that the manufacture will no longer be selling or sustaining. When it comes time to replace a component, you’ll have to search high and low for out-of-stock replacements and pay premium costs to acquire them.
2. Hard Drive Failures – It’s the nature of the business. Hard drives will fail. Many companies rarely label hard drives and where they’re physically located, so when it comes time to replace a failed drive, they have to do extensive analysis and downtime to figure out what exactly needs to be replaced.
3. Support Contracts – This is a big one. If you buy hardware from a major manufacturer like Dell or HP, you’ll likely be getting a support contract. Each support contract has its own costs. If you have multiple servers from multiple manufacturers, you’ll have more than one support contract, which means extra cost. If you need rapid support with faster response times, that’s extra cost.
4. Hardware Experts – Building an enterprise server isn’t like building a desktop computer. You don’t just go buy RAM, you need the specific kind for your specific server at the correct speed, size, socket, and buffering. Researching every server component to ensure that it is cost effective and powerful requires experience and extensive knowledge. When it’s time to upgrade hardware, get ready to do it all again.
5. Assembly – Servers don’t just come to your door with your applications already installed and running on it. You need to receive all the components, build the server, test the hardware, contract with a data center to store it, ship it to the data center, install it, add all OS, software, patches, and other applications, then install and test your own applications. All this takes extensive time and additional cost.
These are only 5 of the many hidden costs of managing hardware. Do you really want to deal with all that? Avoid the headaches that managing hardware can cause by migrating to the XNet Cloud™ . We’ll handle the hardware so you can get back to working on your business.
Click here to learn about how we did it for our Waident Technology Solutions.
