How long do servers usually last? [closed]

Solution 1:

Servers are generally built with fairly high quality components, especially from big brand names. In my experience they can easily run for 5 years easily before becoming unreliable. (replacing the disks in the raid array along the way).

However, they may not be economical in that respect. The capacity/power of new machines keeps rising dramatically, while your overhead costs (human and power) remain expensive. At some point the raw capacity becomes just not worth it.

Solution 2:

Its not likely to find a 10 year old server in the racks unless it has been re-purposed, or isn't replaceable. If nothing else it becomes difficult to find replacement parts. For production use I usually schedule replacement every five years or so. If the budget doesn't allow for purchase of development hardware, they may end up being recycled as development machines.

Server grade hardware is likely to run more or less forever except for moving parts. Support, power requirements, and physical size to performance become the significant factors.

I believe our tax rules allow for a full write-off over three years (actually four reporting years). From a technical standpoint anything you can buy is likely already obsolete. From an accounting standpoint, if it still does the job it isn't obsolete. The performance/cost ratio is continuing to fall and may make earlier replacement a good option.

Solution 3:

Generally, if you're buying a server from one of the big vendors the service-contract for it will be pretty cheap until it turns 5 years old. At that point, if you can even get one, it'll be VERY expensive. For our hardware vendor the 1 year service-contract cost at Year 6 is about 50% the cost of a new server. This is how they encourage regular hardware replacement. You are factoring in the service-contract in your ROI calculations, right?

Once a server turns 5 around here it tends to get relegated to test/dev/low-impact roles and we keep a grave-yard of similar machines for parts if it comes to it. Those of us who keep this hardware running frown very discouragingly when entities ask to use old stuff that we have 'just laying around'.

My oldest monster right now is an ancient HP LH3, a 12 year old server, that is performing a single task: monitoring our datacenter UPS internals. The next oldest is a 9 year old that's due to be replaced in the next 3 months. Neither of these have service-contracts, and if they die we will sigh deeply but won't be otherwise inconvenienced.