My SME employer has been working on a deal with a client for the last year or so to host a long-term project. To prepare for this, they purchased 30 enterprise-grade servers (plus supporting equipment) and hired a small team of ops staff to maintain and manage this new infrastructure.<p>For the last few months the client has been dragging their heels and using the pandemic as an excuse to drive down the price on the project, but costs still would have been covered and they seemed pretty happy with the new price on offer. Work was started in good faith to help hit a specific deadline set by the client, and everyone was collaborating well.<p>Until earlier this week, when the client pulled out of the deal completely and has shut down their side of operations. So my employer is left with a bunch of hardware idling and is now looking to rent them out to other clients.<p>Now, there's enough cash left from the initial investment which gives the business about 6-months of "runway". So this got me thinking what cool things could be done with these servers to jump on the next bleeding-edge tech and start to recoup costs and eventually turn a profit.<p>The servers are a mixture of "compute" machines (many/fast cores, high memory, fewer drives) targeted at analysis workloads, and "storage" (fewer cores, mid memory, many drives). They have 10G connections between them and to the outside world.<p>In this situation, given 30 6-month-old enterprise servers, a small team (3), and 6 months, how would _you_ make best use of these resources to build a business?
I would find an existing business that is hosting on the public cloud. Often, it is just a bunch of VMs that don't really leverage what the cloud has to offer -- they are just convenient.<p>Offer to migrate them from the cloud to a private hosting for what they are paying today but place them on hardware that has x2-10 the existing capacity. You provide all the IT work that they are paying Amazon to avoid.<p>I basically did that for myself. I was paying $10K/mo to Azure. To get the RAM I really needed would have pushed my costs to $20K/mo so I bought $30K (4 machines) in hardware and signed up for coloc @ $1K/mo but it cost me two months in my time to move everything. The time hurt more than the cash.<p>If you can do that for one company that is spending $100K/mo at Azure/AWS/Google, then your runway gets a lot longer.
Without detailed specs for the systems and the internet bandwidth capabilities it is hard to offer any solid ideas. Since there are lots of generic hosting providers, it is probably not sufficiently lucrative area to enter. Are there opportunities with businesses in a similar area to your ex-client? Perhaps their competitors?<p>If I were in your position, I would be looking at applying AI techniques to a niche domain. For example, text mining for legal documents, i.e. eDiscovery-like. The difficulty is that without application domain specific skills it is hard to create sufficient value-add to present a compelling business case.
It heavily depends on your place/area market demands<p>Probe, try analyzing<p><a href="https://homebusinessmag.com/businesses/how-to-guides-businesses/how-to-find-market-research-database-top-10/" rel="nofollow">https://homebusinessmag.com/businesses/how-to-guides-busines...</a><p>IMHO e-commerce so promising