ABSTRACT
Servers and hardware costs have declined over time. When a company’s information technology (IT) team created a new application, additional processing needs were handled by purchasing more servers and installing the servers in the corporate data center. Once the new hardware was assembled and available for use, often called “racked and stacked,” the hardware was plugged in, with the new application software installed on the hardware, and the additional software functionality was off and running. The steep decline in the cost of server hardware beginning in the late 1990s and continuing into the first half of the twenty-first century reduced the cost of adding additional servers to corporate IT infrastructure.
