Customers have been caring for several years now. I can say that on average, I have 7-8 conversations about power to every conversation about performance.

The cost of power continues to increase, and it will only go higher. For instance, if you do the quick math, a 250w average power draw server, at $.13/KwH, will cost you ~$850USD for power over 3 years.

While $850 is no small number, when you look at the 3 year cost of ownership on a server, you find most experts agree that acquisition costs (hardware + software) amount to only 25% of the total cost of ownership.

When you put those two figures together, it’s
clear: Power is a force to be reckoned with (especially because it is infinitely measurable vs. the other TCO “soft costs”), but it still is only one small piece of the overall pie. You really have to consider it all.

One key point made by the competitor is that cost of power is now a large portion of the overall cost-of-ownership for electronics equipment, especially in the data center, that can be quantified and monetized from cost of power consumed by the electronics and the cost of removing the dissipated heat under expected workloads.

Given conservative expectations that the cost of power will only be rising in the future, this “power-factored” total cost-of-ownership becomes increasingly important for marketing and selling electronics, even to consumers as we are beginning to see with Energy Star ratings on TVs and set top boxes.

It seems that the time has come for AMD’s power-saving advantages vs. the competition to be quantified and aggressively marketed. Customers now care.

However, while you point out that updating the environment encompasses many of these costs already, I would counter that in determining the ROI for “updating the environment” would include a lot of manpower and software cost. The key is that the hardware is only a small portion of that overall cost.

ROI is a pretty complex calculation, not something you do “of the cuff”. I asked one of my coworkers who works in AMD’s IT department for the template they use in making ROI decisions. It is far more complicated than (total server cost) / (power savings) = ROI.

The bottom line for us is that in considering how quickly you can pay off that investment in IT technology, you have to consider a variety of factors, and hardware is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what is underwater that is the bigger issue for IT departments.