Server hardware and making a little money.

thedoctor32

So a little back story first, my company routinely replaces older servers (think 2-4 years) with shiny new ones. After all the paper work has been done these perfectly functional older machines are free to take to anyone thats interested.

Over the years I have massed quite a few and up until now they have been running in a lab type environment, but I would like to make at least a small sum of money with there operation, nothing large just a few extra dollars to help offset the cost of power.

I am fluent in VMware, Linux, Windows, and SQL administration so something in that area would be preferable, I am open to any and all suggestions and I can provide details about my environment if it would help.

Jasconius

I'm sure in this day and age there are plenty of resources on fungible computer networks where you can just add disparate systems to a intranet and let them go to town with one another for a central purpose.

You're basically describing a sort of primitive cloud computing network.

So think of a cloud service and see if you can make it.

Ponge

Depending on the spec's of the machines you could try renting the processing power out to local CG/Architectural Visualisation/VFX firms as a render farm. Of course you would probably have to invest pretty heavily in the appropriate licenses

thedoctor32

Most machines are dual Xeon 3.2 Ghz with varying amounts of RAM. Ive considered the render farm thing before and it does intrigue me but Im not sure how to go about it. The technical side I can figure out Im just not sure theres a market for it in my area.

I have done a fair bit of Googling I would have thought others would have been in the same situation before but I cant find anything that doesn't read like a get rich quick scheme.

Vargar

Have any blade or servers with discrete video cards?

thedoctor32

Unfortunately no. I am a year or so away form them decommissioning any of the blade servers.