So much money wasted

So it's that time of year where I have to review our asset data.
One thing that must be kept up to date is this information ready for the AUDIT.  If they ask where a piece of kit is you must be able to show them.
Looking through the servers you kind of see how much the School has spent on it's current stock.  How much does it add up to? over 20K? 30K?  No - Almost £60,000.  That's roughly £7500+ a year on servers.
This is why Virtualization is considered to be the better financial sense not just about reliability, redundancy and future proofing.  If the School had originally planned up to 10 Years down the line for servers like it can on Networking.  It would have gone down the line of my "Dream Plan" which is all apart of different other blogs I've made.

Adopt a Primary

Virtual Server

System from Scratch

So a simple two Virtual Servers, an Exchange box and a authentication Domain Controller.

The total cost of the above if done for our specifications is £30,000.  Which still only covers half the current costs of all the servers.  We could have also spent quite a bit of money going down the SAN route for our storage needs.  The servers could have been over egged for a 10 year plan.
What does that mean?  You don't hold back on storage, memory or processor to make sure you are setup for 10 Years.  It means you have a built system which is reliable and no extra costs down the line - except out of warranty failures which wouldn't be too costly.
Not always able to plan 10 Years - I completely accept this.  Not many knew IT would be very important today.  Now though should Schools look to go for a 10 Year plan when it comes to the "Core" system.  Considering how we spend on the Network side of things but we neglect the servers?
Considering "Cloud" options are still not good enough to consolidate everything externally, we are probably 10 Years at least from that.
Which of course goes back to the title - how much money has been wasted not just lack of planning but the ever changing world?
Now with more budgets being squeezed are we going to see more IT failures?  With Schools pushing for more BYOD or reverting back to PC setups - again how much money is wasted?
I know the major problem in all the above but that's discussed in other posts.