Cost of server was not considered.  I had to narrow the focus of the
research to SPARC, Intel, and Alpha, which, by their nature, also
becomes close to irrelevant when you consider downtime.  For example,
a telecom that my wife worked for used NT4.  They had a glitch that
took two days to fix.  Meanwhile, 150 employees sat idle.  They paid
over $20K in wages because they chose to use cheaper hardware and NT.
That $20K would have paid for a pretty decent Sparc box, or even an 
AIX box.

George


Trent Shipley wrote:
> 
> What did you use as a depreciation schedule.  I have seen a figure as high
> as 7 years to fully depreciate a computer.  However, my impression is that
> by the end of three years most computers have been demoted to an auxiliary
> role.  That is, they get handed down.  The middle aged server becomes some
> engineer's workstation; the executive's old computer gets handed to his
> secretary, and so on.
> 
> The computer might survive five or six years in company service before being
> considered totally obsolete or relegated to being the fax server.
> 
> I guess from the standpoint of accounting this isn't a problem.  They say
> use linear depreciation over five years and that is about right.  The
> problem is more political.  The CEO reads that as an expected service life
> of five years then wants to know why the CIO wants new front-line computers
> in 30 months.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> > [mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of George
> > Toft
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 6:55 AM
> > To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> > Subject: Re: Insurer Considers Microsoft NT High-Risk
> >
> >
> > "Cost" is very tricky.  My thesis was on the Total Cost of Ownership
> > for Workgroup Servers, and the O/S cost is irrelevant.
> 
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