System information

A Principled Technologies test report 44
Comparing performance and cost: Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs.
legacy hardware solution
Energy costs for power and cooling
We measured power utilization of the legacy servers, storage, and switch under load and at idle. We used the
same formulas and assumptions to calculate energy costs for the legacy solution that we used for the Dell PowerEdge
VRTX solution.
Systems management
We expect the HP solution, even with vendor support, to require more hands-on in-house support than the
newer Dell PowerEdge VRTX solution. We include costs for two hours per month hardware management for each server
and one hour per month for the storage array, a total of seven hours a month.
Downtime for users
We estimate negligible downtime for VRTX and nine hours per server per year for the older legacy servers.
To calculate the cost of downtime, we estimate that the SMB has 40 users, with an average salary (including
benefits) of $30 an hour, and that each user loses 20 percent of their productivity for the hours the server is down. With
these assumptions, we calculate a downtime cost of $240 an hour or $6,480.00 for the 27 hours that we estimate one of
the three servers is down each year.