Glossary

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

TCO

The full multi-year cost of running a system: acquisition, hardware maintenance, software licensing, and services, combined.

TCO is the umbrella metric behind most of this site's pillar pages. Annualized Ownership Cost expresses TCO as a per-year figure over a defined hold period; Competitive TCO compares that figure against x86 and cloud alternatives.

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