Model your own power assumptions for server farm costs with this spreadsheet

It’s now taken as a given that power is the leading cost in a data center. But what goes into the term “power?” Power goes beyond the cost of the electricity to include the power delivery infrastructure, the cooling infrastructure, and the cost of the investment money to put in these supporting systems.

James Hamilton, who’s a member of Microsoft’s Data Center Futures Team, wanted put numbers to infrastructure costs, including amortization periods: For example, a server might get written off over 3 years, but cooling infrastructure costs might have a 15 year period. His findings are on his blog post, Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers. And if you want to run what-if scenarios for different amortization periods or electricity costs, or money costs, you can download the spreadsheet he created here.

Via O’Reilly.