Average Computer/Server Crashes per Month/Year

[smogsy]

Hi all,

i manage a bunch of servers at work
(there just really high end desktops used as servers)

we have maybe 1 or 2 a week crash or not play nicely.

I said to my manager its not possible to have 0% failure per month/year.
there is going to be a least an application crash per month.

is there a website somewhere that has figures of server/pc failures per year? to see if these are worst than average?

we have 60 Servers, (worst case 2 crash per week) that's 3%

 

[smogsy]

That's hilariously high. There's no reason a server should crash, your downtime should only be due to patches and limited to scheduled maintenance windows so it can be excluded from any performance metrics.

A server should never flat out stop responding during the business day, and if it does it definitely shouldn't be happening every couple of days.

The fact that your company considers desktops running services to be acceptable says a lot about the environment you have to deal with to be honest, and there's just no way to ever run a slick operation if the sort of processes that lead to that situation are allowed to keep happening.

What are these boxes doing? Why aren't they virtualised on server hardware?

ill try give you some background.

The 30 New servers (1 year old) have had one crash/errors per 30 in 1 year.
The 30 old servers (3.8 years old) have 2 per 30 per week.

i am trying to get the old computers replaced due to this very reason. even with fresh installs with same software running

these Computers are running: [ think casino security type environment]
i5 2.8ghz
4GB Ram
550-TI
16xHD AV Cards
Windows 7 32bit. [cant run server as software is not supported]
50-80% cpu usage 24/7 365 days
GPU usage 40%+

"your downtime should only be due to patches and limited to scheduled maintenance windows so it can be excluded from any performance metrics."

don't get that luxury, a reboot per week is lucky. thats when updates/patches are done. and we need to due to bad memory problems with the av cards.

A server should never flat out stop responding during the business day, and if it does it definitely shouldn't be happening every couple of days.

servers sometime reboot, But mostly our AV cards do have a Memory issues (using to much) which causes this. also we get A LOT of power cuts which i think does not help this. we get around 20+ a year.



as you can understand, these cannot be virtualised to much Hardware required & power needed.
but i am trying to get the old computers replaced.

new calculations:
old servers crash 6% per week
new servers crash 3% per year < that better than average?

 

[smogsy]

and you don't have a UPS setup?

on our main servers/network yes.

but no, getting funding for a UPS per server is hard as there far distance a part. even for a safe shutdown is very hard. there classed as not critical to stay up, but do lose a few hours of work because of it. which i think is funny.

the other problem is our power does not come back on due to the load we push through our building. so ups would not work. we looked into this & we would need a bunch of very large generators which we don't have room for & estimate cost would be double figures of Millions

 

[smogsy]

yeh, i understand all your thoughts, but you must understand how hard it can be to push some management in the right direction.

But why do you need physical capture cards in the lovely world of IP?

not possible the moment. hopefully in coming years we can upgrade. but theres a lot to upgrade.

not got much of a choice at the moment.

i want to do the following things myself, but got justify everything to the T some of you know this

- get Ups up and running [ need to justify this] we going to need a lot
- New Servers with Server Hardware [ordered 1 to approve] needed a new one anyway
- we cant use Windows server [AV Card restrictions] so Windows 7 Pro is going to have to do. to we can upgrade to IP
- Move to our new New AV cards we just approved. As the old ones give us memory leaks most of time causing our crashes. this should help with 99.9% of our crashes. the old av cards are not supported anymore and there drivers was terrible.
- UPS should fix our power cut issues