Let me understand the return.
Invest $130K first year to generate $11K ( 8.5% ).
or
Invest $130K in Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Investor Shares VTSMX
Year 2016 return for the fund is 12.53%.
Well, this is just running on idle capacity in nodes in the lab now. Things like having 40GbE in each node, multiple enterprise SSDs and etc. are not needed for Monero, but are useful in the lab.
Even spending $2200/ C6220 with 2x E5-2670's and 8GB RAM/ node and $400 on a cheap 1GbE switch you would have about the same Monero compute capacity for around $18K in servers/ networking. The struggle then would be to find ~10kW to make power profitable. You would not need a 1GbE+ WAN link and could get away with a 50mbps link instead keeping costs lower. There are certainly other options available if you wanted to keep costs low.
I think the point is that the dedicated Monero mining is going to be much more cost effective than what I am doing. On the other hand, if you have machines and power you are paying for, but not using, this is a potential way to offset operations costs. At the rate I am doing this, the opportunity is $700 to $1000/ month to help offset lab costs using hardware that is already configured and powered on.
Here is an example
@Marsh, if I had access to unlimited numbers of those ASUS 4N2U at the price we paid, plus optimized power/performance CPUs, and minimal RAM, with $5/ 16GB m.2 drives, I would return 2% monthly even using V4 hardware. The downside is that doing so the infrastructure would be worthless for anything else. Alternatively, mining using cards like the RX 480 would be significantly more profitable as some of those have payback (minus power) measured in 8 months or less.
Nov 1 2016 was around $4.75/ XMR and Jan 5 2017 was $18.30 XMR so the fluctuations doing this are too risky for me to devote more concentrated efforts on.