3yr / 5yr Lifespan?

ruffneck

ruffneck

ruffneck

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For business critical hardware?

I'm having a bit of a dispute at work over the lifetime the directors want out of the server room. Now giving the costs of extending warranties after the 3yr period vs cost of new hardware/warranties plus the added bonus its new hardware!. My argument is that a 5yr lifetime would be a false economy.

Your thoughts?
 
We're starting to see notably higher failure rates for equipment over 3 years old at the moment actually. Even if 4 hour response from the manufacturer I wouldn't want to plan on a 5 year lifetime myself.
 
Depends what the servers are doing. If it's business critical and performance is an issue I'd keep to a 3 year lifespan. If they are not business critical then I'd consider 5 years depending on the warranty terms.
 
I deal with a lot of large businesses and it varies. They are all either 3 years of 5 years by policy.

Most people are three years. Only a few are five years.

Sometimes 5 years is used to make a business case stack up. If a piece of hardware such as a SAN easily meets requirements and nothing inherently new is needed then it's common for the maintenance to be extended to five years. Remember swapping out hardware brings with it a lot more work for the IT team.

Right now is a bad time for a lot of businesses and the only way to get capex signed off is to make the business case cost neutral or make it a long term so that the next expenditure will likely not be until the economy picks up.
 
Depends on the size of business.

Take a SME with an SBS box... they might only have / need / afford a single server yet if / when it breaks, it's a big problem for them.

I have several sites still chugging away on SBS 2000, so easily 5 years+. As Vanilla says, it takes a lot of work to pry open wallets at present. Trying to show a worst case scenario to get them to upgrade / make improvements is difficult, as it's easy to look like you are scaremongering.

FWIW, we've just retired an AD DC at work -an HP LH6000 (Quad Xeon 700s). The status LCD was a borked but it's chugged away happily for years.
 
ruffneck said:
For business critical hardware?

I'm having a bit of a dispute at work over the lifetime the directors want out of the server room. Now giving the costs of extending warranties after the 3yr period vs cost of new hardware/warranties plus the added bonus its new hardware!. My argument is that a 5yr lifetime would be a false economy.

Your thoughts?
Click to expand...

Does that cost analysis include new OS licences?
 
I say both, I think its dependant on the applications that the server is running, but at the moment our current servers are well out of date, I really need to find a new job, one which values IT

Stelly
 
I'm talking about the application servers running business critical databases, the domain controllers and the exchange servers.
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
Providing it's covered by same-day response and meets the hardware demands, 5 years.
Click to expand...

I'd disagree, our servers of 4 or 5 years old are starting to fail with regularity, usually the same fault too, no display and the motherboard needs replacing. Even if it's covered by same day support (4 hour fix in our case) it's still a problem if it's a critical system so just having it covered by warranty isn't enough given the increased risk of failure.
 
ruffneck said:
I'm talking about the application servers running business critical databases, the domain controllers and the exchange servers.
Click to expand...

How much money would the company lose in a total disaster scenario where the DCs all died and you had to bring new servers in and recover AD etc?
 
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