D2 3 Computing e-Infrastructure cost calculations and business _models_vam1-final

e-­‐FISCAL: www.efiscal.eu
EC Contract Number: 283449
*A respondent commented that for CPU, first level switches are included in the servers’ price. For instance, blade centres
already include switches.
** Four respondents made comments on the “other” option in this question. Their comments could be summarised as follows:
These support terms are included in hardware tender specifications (for 3 years or 3-­‐5 years) and are difficult to separate (not
typically included in contract as a line item). Apart from that some centres pay extra money for support while others don’t.
*** Due to the wording of the question the analyses that follows has used 50% of the average percentage value of auxiliary
equipment over investment in order to calculate the yearly cost per core and cost per core hour.
Table 21: Cost relations over investment
The software costs are most accurately characterised as an operating expense in today's e-­‐Infrastructure
ecosystem. The majority of the system software used today is produced in collaborations (in which many of the
service providers participate) and released under open source license, which can explain both the relatively low
proportion of the costs and large variations between centres.
This contrast with the situation in many of the ICT environments outside the research domain, where the software
licenses for applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems may form the biggest part of the
capital expenditure, and a division of the software costs between CAPEX (license fees) and OPEX (service
contracts) is necessary 74 . In Intersect 360 report a significant difference between software expenditure for
academia and business is witnessed; academia spending significantly less on software licences and maintenance
costs.
Personnel information
Salary levels exhibit significant differences among countries (ref. Min and Max values in Table 22). It could be
argued that personnel cost is a cost element that is highly dependent on local -­‐ country conditions; a
phenomenon which is less evident as far as technology, type of infrastructure or architecture are concerned (i.e.
the procurement of hardware or storage in two different counties is not expected to deviate to such an extend
only due to the geographical area). Therefore the structure of our sample (i.e. counties participating in the survey)
form some metrics of average and median personnel costs that for some other countries could be exceptionally
high or low respectively. Interestingly enough the median cost per FTE from the EGI compendium data set is
€44.000 while the average cost is €46,200 close to our findings.
Please provide the following information related to the average yearly salary per FTE.
Answer Options Min Max Average Median
Average yearly salary cost per FTE (gross salary plus
employee benefits and bonuses) in ‘000 € in 2011
15 108 54.21 48.80
74 It should be noted that assessing the overall costs of the European e-­‐Science ecosystem are outside of the
scope of this study. However, it is possible to assume that algorithmic developments and software maintenance
tasks that are directly related to research would require similar amounts of effort in dedicated or on-­‐demand
infrastructure. The overall structure and behaviour of the scientific software ecosystem is a topic of an e-­‐IRG Task
Force on Scientific Software.
e-­‐FISCAL : Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-­‐Infrastructures
Deliverable D2.3 – Computing e-­‐Infrastructures cost estimation and analysis – Pricing and
Business models
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