How to make money on a blade server (or at least not go into the red)?

Question

Iron

Good time. IBM BladeCenter H
is available with six BladeCenter HS22 (7870) blades, 2 Xeon X5570 4C 2.93GHz 8MB 1333MHz processors, 32Gb RAM and 2x73Gb SAS HDD each. They gave me this thing with the only condition that I would never sell it in any form. As a person, I keep my word of honor. Even before the appearance of the server, there was an idea for a project using serious capacities, some developments, etc., but in the end everything died out and now the server is dead weight. This is very upsetting and I want to correct the situation, so I thought about how to use and, if possible, monetize the available capacities.
At home, it is impossible to keep this kind of server turned on for a long time - it makes quite a lot of noise. In data centers, colocation will cost about 15-20 thousand rubles per month (excluding additional services such as protection from DDOS or IPv4 subnets). Plus, if you use licensed products like VmWare, the cost of ownership will increase even more significantly.
Over the past six months, I wrote a dozen times to different people in different areas, where, in my opinion, the server could be useful or somehow used - 2 refusals, ignore the rest. It is understandable that some outsider writes semi-crazy ideas, tries to get into your business - I would not answer either.
There was an idea to write a startup topic on Habr, in which to ask the community for help to generate and develop an idea from a piece of iron to a business by joint efforts, with mandatory coverage of what is happening. But, I'm afraid they will laugh and downvote, who cares about my petty problems, but I value my readonly.
From all of the above, the following question or even a request for help is formed - help me figure out how to use my charm effectively and profitably. If someone needs a similar server to develop their business, I'm ready to join, we can discuss the conditions. Maybe you can tell me who is looking for such capacities or who to try to contact. I will be glad to any answers.
Let me just make a few points:
- mining is immediately canceled. After reading similar topics and advice in them, for the sake of experiment, I tried it on one blade. As a result, according to my calculations, and I tend to trust them, mining on all 12 processors is comparable to one modern video card, only the video card consumes much less electricity and does not make noise like a jet plane.
- VPS also tried to roughly calculate, it turned out at full load about 24-28 thousand rubles a month can be received in the form of a monthly fee. However, there are quite a few additional costs. Yes, and such a number of people who want to rent capacity still need to be found.
- game servers. I don’t know about the licensing side of the issue, but a forum, technical support, etc. will be needed. This is if you do it well. Too bad, I don't want to for a couple of days.
- Donate power to charity to study any important issue (medicine, science, etc.). This is great, but, as I wrote above, the main task at least is not to go into negative budget.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In this form and under such conditions, no one needs it.
If you were selling - well, selling such iron at the moment without problems, I would even take it for myself if the price was adequate.
But to rent - why should I? If I'm renting, it's from a well-known company that has an office, reputation, and guarantees. That is, renting from an incomprehensible private trader is not an option.
The only way to monetize is to use it in your project.
If you have a project where this hardware is in demand, monetize it.
There is no such project - do not monetize.
To create a project for a bunch of old iron - well, honestly, it's ridiculous.

Answer 2

Monetization is unlikely. By itself, the blade is about nothing. To sell something at these capacities, you will need a harness - networks, switches, etc.
For the benefit of humanity - put it somewhere in a basement closet, and connect all the blades to BOINC, to any of your favorite projects. Or give access to the FreeBSD team for assembly / autotests.

Answer 3

Now your budget is 0. In order not to go into negative territory, you must at least not power the servers :-)
There may be teams, including startups, that need servers, but they don’t want to spend money on them, but they can place them somewhere- then in their data centers. You can negotiate with them, install a virtualization system and divide the server capacity proportionally by agreement. The server is not sold, don't go to "-", the remaining capacities can be used for your projects. Small SAS disks - in fact only for small virtual machines.

Answer 4

Give someone for cookies. The iron is quite old, you won’t do anything worthwhile with it from scratch.

Answer 5

the rack must be provided as an "iron" platform. no need to be smart. advertise, find clients yourself. up to the fact that he himself loads the rack with in-demand tasks and be an operator. in general, there are many ways to make money on such hardware.

Answer 6

for 20k colocation you can take six of these servers in hetzner
https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver...
which completely covers your blade at times
, alas, you won’t be able to earn

Answer 7

You didn't mine it. Try Monero (XMR) - it's cpu only mining, a couple of months ago I mined it on purchased VPSs, and that turned out to be a plus.