Mutiny Blog

The subject of hardware refresh has for many years incited heated debate. Pressure to ‘sweat your assets’ is pitted against escalating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as maintenance costs soar and aging kit fails to keep pace. Whilst few are happy to bow without question to market pressure to constantly upgrade and replace, it has been well proven that extending the life of your hardware for too long leads to additional, unnecessary expenditure. 

 

Research from IDC found that failure rates for servers began to climb as they entered their fourth year of service and after three years the return on new server investment was over 150%. The reasons are many; power and cooling costs are higher than those of contemporary counterparts and fewer in-built systems administration tools make management more time-consuming. At some point older equipment will experience more breakdowns – exposing services to risk. Yet a refresh policy based on timescales alone fails to take into account technology advancements and the changing needs of the business.

 

Refresh time

True life-cycle asset management aims for an optimised model where perfectly fit-for-purpose applications deliver first-rate services supported by the most cost-efficient hardware available – a perfect and unrealistic place to be. So what are the signs that the time is right to review, refresh and revive?

Inability to source spare components, compatibility issues, end-of-life products and system requirements for new applications all have a bearing on hardware decisions. Strategic business matters including targets for capacity planning and data centre consolidation inevitably mean a closer look at how to get there is required. The trend towards virtualization equates to consolidation of workloads onto fewer physical machines with associated lower operating expense. 

Without doubt there are times when the market will dictate the decision for you. Take the recent withdrawal of support for Windows Server 2003 on 14 July of this year. Now that Microsoft will no longer deliver critical security updates or system patches there is a need to migrate to a supported platform and this may also require a hardware refresh. 

It ain’t broke – don’t fix it!

Contrary to popular belief, it may well make sense to hang on to older but reliable kit, especially in cases where budgets are squeezed or business uncertainty presides. Provided that acceptable service levels are maintained and security remains intact there may not, in fact, be a need to upgrade your hardware at least in the immediate term.   A suitable strategy to determine your infrastructure’s fate is whether processes meet the needs of the business at this point in time and the foreseeable future. 

One thing is certain -- businesses will always strive to get the best performance from their existing estates. A robust network monitoring solution will buy some valuable time by detecting the signs of failure, measuring the mean time between failures (MTBF) and service redundancy. This means that aging, but fit for purpose equipment can be retained so that businesses can sweat their assets further and replace them when they truly become end of life.