How Often Do Windows Servers Need to be Restarted?

A little background: We have several Windows servers (2003, 2008) for our department. We're a division of IT so we manage our own servers. Of the four of us here I'm the only one with a slight amount of IT knowledge. (Note the "slight amount".) My boss says the servers need to be restarted at least weekly. I disagree. Our IT Department says that because she restarts them constantly that's the reason why our hard drives fail and power supplies go out on them. (That's happened to a few of our servers a couple times over the last four years, and very recently.)

So the question is: How often does everyone restart their Windows servers? Is there an industry standard or recommendation? Is our IT department correct in saying that because we re-start that's why we're having hardware issues? (I need a reason if I'm going to change her mind!)

My boss says the servers need to be restarted at least weekly

I strongly disagree. Microsoft has made great strides since the good-ole [NT, anyone?] days with regard to stability and uptime. It's a shame the consensus within IT support has not changed along with this.

How often does everyone restart their Windows servers?

Only when required -- Either because of an OS/software update, a critical software failure which cannot be recovered via other methods, hardware upgrade/replacement or other activity that cannot happen without a restart.¹

Is there an industry standard or recommendation?

I have never seen a standard recommendation, per se, but I could not agree with any recommendation [except from MS themselves] which would indicate a required reboot at a specific time interval "just-because".

Is our IT department correct in saying that because we re-start that's why we're having hardware issues?

Restarting [and, more so, power cycling] is the most stressful period of hardware activity for a computer. You have most everything spinning up to 100% -- disk and fans... ...as well as significant fluctuations in component temperatures. Modern hardware is incredibly resilient, but that shouldn't be a reason for just bouncing servers, on a whim, a few times a week.

¹ Aside, I loathe when techs "just" reboot a Windows server in the case of a failed service, or the like. I understand the need to get the service running again, but a reboot should be the last step in trouble shooting a server. Identifying, and fixing[!], the root cause of failure should almost never result in "Meh, just reboot it...."

Windows servers need to be rebooted monthly, if you're applying patches. You are applying patches, right? Right?

I'll give an alternative answer for a very specific case. The advances of the last 2-3 years may have changed this, but if you have heavily-used TS or Citrix servers that run a lot of interactive application (like Office), it's been a good idea to do weekly reboots off-hours, just to start from a clean slate for resources like stuck sessions, used desktop heap, etc. If you have your farm set up right and stagger the reboots, even if you have light use off-hours, users should not be impacted.

Sure, it's regular reboots of servers, but they're being used like desktops.

This is more a political and psychological issue than a technical one.

In my experience, certain people who worked with some of the much older versions of windows got it into their heads that they needed weekly reboots, and they have enshrined that philosophy in a little corner of their mind (they never do seem to notice when a reboot is missed when they're on vacation, though). Unless you've got some very unstable systems and applications, it's no longer based in reality.

On the flip side, frequent reboots may catalyze hardware failure, but are not terribly likely to be the cause of it.

The only time they should need to be restarted is for maintenance if everything is working correctly. Scheduled reboots are truly only a requirement when A) upgrading software, B) performing hardware maintenance, or C) dealing with a memory leak that can't be solved by restarting the software/service causing it. While windows isn't known for long uptimes, it does happen (last job had some Win2k boxes that were up for months at a time - they just worked). Just remember that any patching will most likely require reboots.