Well, I just spent the past two days trouble-shooting problems on a ProLiant 6400R server that is 7 or 8 years old and has been redeployed for at least the 3rd time. The 6400R is one of the first Pentium III Xeon, quad-processor servers I ever worked with and is the first platform I ever used to support VMware ESX Server 1.x for server virtualization.
While I remember this model fondly; I exhausted a lot of time & effort to make the server viable for the Windows Server 2003 operating system and the intended application it was going to support, Oracle PROPworks. I had to rebuild the server twice when I discovered the array controller had to be replaced. I also discovered that the latest driver package (Support Pack) from HP wouldn't fully support this legacy server. Where is this going you ask? At what point should we put the server out to pasture and buy new instead of trying to eak one more deployment out of hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer?
I wish I could find a good rule on diminishing returns for redeployment of server equipment. Depending on the organization it may be the norm to drive the servers into the ground and then only grudgingly release them to Silicon Valhalla. One former employer would keep their server equipment at least three years while this capital asset depreciated and would have to dispose of the equipment afterwards.
I do like that many vendors offer trade-in programs for older servers and even those from other vendors. HP has several programs listed here and I have used a program from Sun to trade-in various low and mid-range Sun and HP RISC servers towards the purchase of some high-end SunFire servers. While I didn't get as much as I would have liked, it was probably less expensive than disposing of these fully depreciated assets. So, when should a server be retired:
- When no longer supported by the vendor and a support contract cannot be purchased.
- When refurbished parts can no longer be obtained to replace failed components?
- When fully depreciated or when they retain no value?
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