That entirely depends on your purpose, business and cost hardware issues would have. We go on a three year cycle here. Do we have boxes older for various reasons? Yes, but those are decided on a case by case basis.
Support. How important to the business is it? If it's important, then it gets replaced. Period. Hardware cost is a small part of the equation. Downtime, loss of business, potential loss of access to the data and how much that would cost the business, etc. Tactical. Is their new hardware technology coming out soon from our HW vendor? If yes, we may delay new hardware (new HP series later this year?) so that we will get the benefit of the new technologies sooner. If you can stretch your budget and risk on hardware for 5 years and all the associated OS and associated application updates associated with it, then that's is perfectly alright. But if you business would have a negative cost then there is nothing wrong with updating in a timely manner. We have much older systems out there. We find them irritating and darn near impossible to get sign off on upgrading them 'because it's working fine' when no, not really, it strains the support people more when things go wrong on them. Again, this is all down to your business requirements, not 'replacing hardware sooner then 5 years is just wrong'. Steven Peck On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Terry Dickson <te...@treasurer.state.ks.us> wrote: > I pretty much agree, we replace after three years, then we have always > re-tasked the systems and used them for other projects for at least 5 > years. We have some that are whitebox products that are over 7 years and > still running. If we do not have a production use for them we move them > into a test network and still utilize them there. > > > > From: Mike Gill [mailto:lis...@canbyfoursquare.com] > Sent: Friday, March 26, 2010 12:05 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: How would you go about this? > > > > I don’t understand this mentality. I would expect to get 3 years from some > white box generic desktop built with on-sale, B-grade components. With all > the discussions on the list lately for getting matching brand hard drives, > integrated management and other things than imply quality of build, this is > (IIRC) the second comment I’ve read in the last few months where someone has > difficulty with the concept of tech making it 5 years. If you’re buying > factory gear from hard drive to power cord you’re paying premium top dollar. > That money should mean something besides just the service contract. Specific > performance requirements and current economic conditions aside, if you can’t > get at least 5 years out of your servers before replacement, then IMO you > need help. > > > > -- > Mike Gill > > > > From: Holstrom, Don [mailto:dholst...@nbm.org] > Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 6:15 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: How would you go about this? > > > > You get five years out of a server? I think you need the help. I was just > looking for some help in picking up a file server. I replace all my > workstations and servers every three years. But I only have 130 workstations > and servers. > > > > Your growth estimate is OK as it increases here at the Museum. That is why I > am splitting the data onto several HDs. Thanks for your help… > > > > > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
