Retirement Planning: For your Server

For better or worse, companies are keeping their servers around longer. Due to tighter IT budgets and more durable and powerful hardware, companies no longer replace servers every two years. Now, some wait as long as four or five years.

In Summary:

•	Businesses should base server upgrade decisions on concrete performance metrics, not depreciation schedules.
•	Creating a long-term server replacement plan reduces your odds of updating servers too soon or too late.
•	Assigning servers to new and less demanding tasks, rather than discarding them, can be a great way to get more value from old hardware.

According to the 2005 Global Server Survey from Boston-based Yankee Group Research Inc., 58% of organizations worldwide now retain their file servers an average of four to six years.

Companies that plan ahead and think strategically will end up making the smartest, most cost-effective decisions about when to upgrade their server hardware.

And companies that put off a server replacement simply to save money may increase their risk of weak performance and service outages. That can have an affect not only on internal network operations but also on external relationships with business partners, suppliers and customers. On the flip side, upgrading too soon can be pointless and costly.

The best approach to setting server replacement cycles is to base your decisions on concrete network performance data and careful forecasts of your future needs. Approaching server upgrades methodically is the only way to know for sure whether new hardware will cost you more than it saves, or save you more than it costs.

Take performance data into account

There are few rules for when businesses should replace their servers, but, one thing experts agree on is that waiting longer than five years is usually a mistake. The percentage of servers experiencing some form of component failure jumps from 10% in year four to 50% in year five, according to James Browning, a research vice president at IT analyst firm Gartner Inc. in Stamford, CT. Additionally, service contracts often expire at the 3 or 4 year mark, and replacement part prices begin climbing then too. And by year 5 computer manufacturers are less willing to extend a warranty or no longer make the replacement parts for older systems.  Another factor is new software added to a network will have higher hardware requirements, that the old server might not meet.

The only reliable way to know when it makes fiscal sense to replace a server is to maintain detailed performance records and analyze them for signs of aging.  Collecting data on a quarterly basis that look at reliability, uptime, bandwidth consumption, and CPU utilization.  A machine that consistently tops 70 percent utilization or experiences above-average periods of unplanned downtime is probably costing you more than an upgrade would.

Consider business needs when planning your upgrades

By combining those numbers with growth estimates, companies can not only make smart short-term upgrade decisions but also build a long-term server replacement schedule. A solid plan should factor in not just projected processing and storage needs but future operating system, database, and application deployments as well.

Consider reusing and recycling servers

Also worth considering is the possible reuse of old servers for new and less demanding purposes. For example, obsolete production servers often make perfectly acceptable backup devices, because their lower performance standards are good enough for brief emergency periods.