A system, method and computer program product for optimizing total cost of ownership (TCO) of a piece of IT equipment, e.g., a hard drive or server, using predictive analytics. The data center environment monitors and measures a number of environment variables, including temperature, Relative Humidity, and corrosion. For each piece of hardware, several pieces of data are assigned, including a criticality measure, an operational cost (function of environment), a static replacement cost, and a downtime cost (function of time). For each piece of hardware, if it has not yet failed, the system predicts a time-to-failure using the environment variables. If predicted time-to-failure exceeds an expected reference life criteria, real time TCO analytics is performed to minimize data center energy usage and / or maximize operational cost-efficiency.