Velocity 2010: James Hamilton, "Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation"

That split of where the money goes comes directly from calculations and a spreadsheet that James Hamilton has developed. You should check out his Velocity talk for more (about 5 minutes in) link to this video The numbers on the slides modify the assumptions on the spreadsheet at link

I may be missing something, but that post doesn't address the expense of power, it talks about the relative consumption of networking equipment compared to the rest of the facility. Power is expensive, and James Hamilton generally spends lots of time talking about it, his Velocity keynote ( link to this video ) about datacenter innovations focused primarily on power and cooling (heat being a biproduct of power consumption).

The comment in general may be true but I don't see electricity costs being "much greater than CPU purchase costs over the lifespan" at least not for a data center operator. The AWS M4 EC2 instance uses "2.3 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors or 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2676 v3 (Haswell) processors" 0 so about 4-6 years old and may approach 7 years. A comparable processor Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2670 v3 costs about $ 1600 1 in bulk. Average US home electricity price is ~ 0.13 $/month 2, this would probably be much lower for a data center operator. The mentioned processors probably consume ~ 150 W at full load, which will probably not be the case most of the time. Anyway,…

According to James Hamilton who is a distinguished engineer at AWS no: link and link And you can watch him say it too: link to this video