Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore’s Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, discussed how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.