> Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't.
Sadly it's not always that simple.
People's time, salaries, falls into the base expenditure.
Hardware acquisition is a discretionary cost, which is usually squeezed particularly in a cost-centre like IT support. Or the existing hardware is under a multi-year lease from a vendor like Dell or HP and has to be paid-for whether it's obsolete or not.
Where I've worked ( big non-IT-orientated companies ) it's more typical to throw a couple of people onto a project to debug and refactor an application than buy better hardware. Or even worse, implement a new project on existing shared hardware.
Yes that can happen if people are already on staff and can be assigned to such an effort. But if the choice is spend $50K on new hardware, vs. hire three new devs to rewrite/optimize the software, the decision is easy.
Yep, there is only me and company doesn't want to hire a new dev so hardware is the cheapest way to speed things up now and it'll still be there when we are finished.
Re:Power9 to the People
by corey_moncure on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @12:17PM
(#15862830)
Salaries are taxed, hardware is deducted and amortized.
Inherited a complete mess of a system (response time measured in minutes) running on an Xeon E3 w/8GB of RAM and 500GB of spinny rust.
It's going to take months if not years to unscrew some of the mess so I suggested to the boss the quickest way of improving it was to upgrade the server so we ordered a Xeon E5 dual processor system with 32GB of DDR4 and 1TB DC grade SSD.
Once I've ported the system from PHP5 to 7 on that and moved to a recent MySQL version we'll get a very nice perf improvement for basically free and then I can refactor the mess and at the end we'll have a better optimised system running on much better hardware.
Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't.