> Is rackmount equipment cheaper than regular consumer PC hardware?
Not even close for new, but a generation or two old can be had very cheaply.
I was was once gifted a 128 node cluster (with the racks, UPS, everything) to a lab for the tax write off alone - they even provided shipping. The servers were only 3 years old iirc, but had depreciated enough on their books I guess and they wanted a faster cluster.
Shipping and write off is much cheaper than disposal.
I recall as college students finding a VAX 780 on the "getting rid of it" part of the engineering loading dock and we got permission to get rid of it for them. Pushing it down the street at 11pm was interesting (getting a weird look from a police car going by).
It got gutted for parts (power supplies don't care too much about what they power) and converted into a lockable bookshelf and 14" diameter wall hangings (and some surprisingly strong magnets).
The "yea, we let a bunch of college students take it" was a significant savings over getting a truck to haul it off to some junkyard even before the days of being very picky about electronics recycling.
Not even close for new, but a generation or two old can be had very cheaply.
I was was once gifted a 128 node cluster (with the racks, UPS, everything) to a lab for the tax write off alone - they even provided shipping. The servers were only 3 years old iirc, but had depreciated enough on their books I guess and they wanted a faster cluster.