So Debbie, Harry and I have done some extremely rough counts trying to compute the TCO of the Pcounter system, and how much resource we stand to save when we decommission these servers at the end of the month.

There are 5 physical servers, and one virtual server providing the Pcounter service. The high number of servers is a result of HPGATE's instability when serving a large number of printers. The cost of the physical servers is recorded in quickbase as $5,500 each. The cost of the Pcounter software is $2500/year. Our virtual server is not run out of the provisioning group, but a standalone machine running the free VMware with about 4 client OSs.

5 x $5500 = $27,500 for 5 physical servers

$5500 / 4 = $1,375 for 1 VM

$28,875 for hardware savings over a 3 year replacement cycle.

The Pcoutner license is $2,500/year, so our software savings are about $7,500 over three years.

So in dollars, decommissiong the Pcounter servers should save about $36,375 over three years.

There are ome other savings that may eclipse the dollar cost of the boxes, when considered over time.

So, we're talking about a permanent reduction of about 5670 BTUs/hour, 10.5 U of physical space, and 10.5 network ports.

Finally, as a guesstimate, we'd get paged off hours about 12 times per year on the Pcounter servers, so the cost of maintaining a 24x7 on-call rotation is also reduced.

I wasn't able to easily find the cost of our Novell Academic Licensing Agreement or the total number of servers that OIT is running to generate a meaninful OS cost per server.