What's your company's typical hardware lifespan?

techfiend

I'm currently in a position planning and replacing Pentium D workstations with i3/i5 so about 8 years since a hardware upgrade. 2 of 3 servers are less than 2 year old xeons while the third is a pentium D, that's soon to be recycled. I'm curious to know how often does the company you work for upgrade hardware?

msteinhilber

For us it depends on a handful of factors be it the role the hardware serves, how critical that role is, etc.

The servers we run our virtual environment on for example are typically replaced every 3 years as the warranties run out, with the old servers typically becoming re-purposed to a lab virtual environment. Workstation's are on a longer lifecycle, 5 years or more in some cases or until they just die. CEO and stakeholder's in the company often run them longer than most end users - probably that whole apprehension to spend their own money kicking in. Same with networking equipment, more critical hardware such as that at corporate where an outage means certain services are down state wide get on the roadmap for replacement sooner than the hardware at a branch office where anywhere from 5 to 50 or so users would be affected.

So it really varies from company to company and role to role. Sometimes you'll even encounter a fairly critical role running on old hardware/software that isn't replaced or upgraded be it due to cost of a new version of some proprietary software (hence why it's still running on old hardware/OS) or because the service interruption would be too significant so they just keep it in place and pray.

Plantwiz

Ideally, one recommends about an 18 month to 36 month turn around. The most sensitive areas being upgraded first and their hardware being downgraded to less critical areas. That stated, it may not be realistic particularly since a plethora of hardware can function about 6-8 years on software including a few upgrades.

Most clients I've had are not willing to foot the bill on a 100% upgrade, but can be educated to upgrade their most sensitive areas more frequently, and downgrading the older machines into less critical areas until they finally phase them out into retirement. I have not seen any company who can plan and pay for a 100% turn in a year or two. Best to aim for a 5 year window particularly when licensing is considered.

And realistically, many areas can handle 5 year old equipment whether or not we as tech folk like that thought, truthfully, most can. Plus, there has not been that much of a change in the past few years regarding hardware to justify the investment for most companies...now, should they begin or have been planning for an upgrade...YES! But, as much as I too enjoy bright, shiny, new toys, financially, it just does not make sense to me to toss old working hardware in many of the situations I've come across. I will not dispute that there are some folks who definitely need current hardware and software, but as consultants, it is our job to educate as well as understand our client needs to the technology they can afford. Risk is part of affordable technology...it is our job to educate about which systems are critical and recommend appropriate upgrades...sometimes working with accountants to help them plan proper depreciation.

1.5-3 years is the goal.

5-7 or 8 years is what I see.

techfiend

There are probably a lot of companies that have at least one computer beyond end of life running crucial software, sometimes I wonder if updating the hardware and using the os in a vm would be a better alternative.

5 years seems like a good goal for workstations these days but I think cpu technology has slowed down a lot. Nehalem was 6 years ago, those are still really good for workstations. 3 years would be Sandy Bridge, 1.5 would be Ivy Bridge. I personally only update my computers every 3-4 years at home and pass the old one to family and friends where they use it for another 3+ years.

Maybe a year after Microsoft's 'tock' os would be a good time to upgrade. Tock relating to Tick-Tock ME/tick -> XP/tock -> Vista/tick -> 7/tock -> 8/tick -> 10/tock?. The only one that doesn't fully deserve the tick is 8 but they goofed enforcing the start screen. Which comes out to 3-4 years if the 7 years between XP and 7 isn't included.

Server OS is every 5 years, is that too long to upgrade servers? Doesn't sound too bad unless the server's demand grows a lot.

gorebrush

We are an outsourcer so we've got a lot of client equipment here.

I know of a few Windows NT4 servers still alive and kicking.

nachodba

My old company replaced servers 2 year prior to warranty expiration (although we bought the longest warranty available, 5 or 6 years from Dell.) Once the new servers were migrated to, we used the old servers in a test lab. As far as workstations, we would replace them when one of two things happened. First, the machine could no longer handle the workload the user required. Second, If four years had passed but the machine was still fine for its workload it would be used for interns or given to employees who needed a machine at home.

gc8dc95

Every 3-5 years for pretty much everything. This includes all network equipment. Routers, Switches, Servers, Desktops, Laptops, etc. There are a few exceptions to that depending on software requirements or purpose of the equipment. We usually strive to keep everything under warranty.

PurpleIT

Servers & storage are generally based off of warranty availability - they are too important to be allowed to go down. I am getting ready for a 5 year tech-refresh and there is a lot of life is left in them, but we just can't risk them going down and not being able to get parts.

Like others have said, I would like to roll them into a lab environment to play with.

Workstations vary depending on what is needed. A secretary can get along just fine on 5-7 year old machine, especially if it has a fresh copy of the OS. Our power users typically don't go more than 2-3 years on high-end i7 boxes.

Verities

We'll keep a system running for a long as we can until they break and parts are no longer made for them. We're running a large number a servers that are 9-10 years old. The company is really intent on saving as much money as possible and that means providing sub par solutions...which is very common in businesses.

techfiend

Is it common place to buy a new (refurb) server to act as the main and have the old primary server as backup? This makes quite a bit of sense and what the company I work for does but for some reason ad, dns and dhcp run a very old workstation. Once I get control I'll probably put those roles in a vm on the main server with backup replication.

Are there certain server roles that should be together and others that shouldn't?