[Beowulf] RE: Capitalization Rates - How often should you replace a cluster? (resent - 1st sending wasn't posted ).

[Mark Hahn]

> Think about it: if you pay 1/3 the cost of a new node per year in rent
> and utilities,

that seems amazingly high to me.  I don't have much sense for rent,
but even if we ran our clusters on "retail" power rates it would only
amount to 2.3% of purchase cost.  you could pretty easily argue that 
our purchase prices are high, but even so still < 10%/year.  with your
kind of costs, wouldn't it make sense to consider a colo site?  from
a cursory grep of the web, it sounds like they're still substantially
less than 33%...