Many organizations have postponed server upgrades during the recession. As the economy recovers, these organizations may now be thinking about upgrades. Their servers have may be getting beyond useful life and are unable to run the latest or supported versions of software. Of a greater concern is whether their servers may be at risk of hardware failure.
Servers today are cheaper and far more capable than those bought four or five years ago. A good rule of thumb is to replace servers no sooner than three years after the original purchase (they are still under manufacturer’s warranty) and no later than five years. After five years, the probability of hardware failure, particularly for disk subsystems, goes up noticeably.
However, the best upgrade approach may not be replacing existing physical servers with the latest server hardware. There are two strategies to be considered before making that purchase. First, if there is more than one server that needs replacing, organizations should consider buying a more powerful server and use virtualization to replace two or three (or perhaps more) physical servers. Virtualization is the technique where multiple instances of server software, including the operating system, can be run on the same physical hardware.
An even more intriguing possibility is to retire at least some physical servers completely and outsource their functions. For example, organizations should not be hosting their own websites internally. Other prime candidates for outsourcing include email, CRM and Intranet servers. Unless there are compelling reasons, there is little advantage to keeping those functions on internal servers.
For a relatively modest monthly fee, organizations can remove the administrative burden and expense of running their own servers. Further, these hosting companies provide the redundant power, Internet connectivity, spam and virus prevention, monitoring and other functions that most organizations would not be able to do cost-effectively themselves.
The number of hosted solutions is continuing to grow as “Cloud Computing” matures. I will be discussing Cloud Computing in a future blog post.
If you would like to discuss this in more depth or if you would like to put together a plan, please send an email to ed.mchugh@tekexpertise.com.
