Blog - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 9:47 - 19 Comments

When should you replace a server?

blog Over at AUTechHeads, our good friend and systems administrator Alan Lee muses about the choices faced by IT admins when a warranty expires on a server. The choices are agonising — and so often, about how much money your business can afford to spend rather than ‘doing the right thing’ with respect to technology roadmaps. Writes Alan:

“So you have a bunch of servers, one doing Exchange, a few doing websites, another doing some super-secret ninja stuff and one hundred desktop computers. They are all working perfectly – today. The only issue is you are just about to pass the three year mark of which your warranty will expire on the servers. What do you do? Do you replace the servers? Do you renew the warranty for another year or two? Or just let it keep going in its current form? Or are you about to leave the company and don’t care (the next guys problem™)?”

Personally, in 2011, for a business this size, I would get rid of as many on-premise servers as possible. Shift as much to cloud computing as you can … email, your intranet, the company web site and so on. Internally networked company file storage can also be backed up off-site in a cloud and so on. The difficult choices Alan writes about here are precisely the reason why cloud computing is becoming pervasive. Let someone else handle most of the drudge work, so you can focus on higher order business outcomes.

Image credit: Whrelf Siemens, royalty free