You might be familiar with our gentle nudges from time to time as your server gets a bit long in the tooth. There are good reasons for this, let’s consider just these three simple points…
- The disk drives inside your server are spinning around 10,000 RPM. The server is on 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. There comes a time when things simply wear out. It’s not all that unusual when an aged server is powered cycled (eg system reboot or power outage), one of the disk drives simply refuses to spin back up – resulting in a critical failure.
- Servers have considerable airflow. They draw air in from the front and exhaust out the rear, cooling internal components on the way through. Inevitably your server componentry will accumulate fine airborne dust and over the years this builds into a dense layer (which may not be visually obvious). Eventually this layer will absorb humidity from the air creating a gel-like crust. This in turn can result in failed electronics.
- A server’s expected life span is typically around five years (as is for a lot of hard working electronic devices).
Once beyond the warranty period spare parts become increasingly difficult or even impossible to source with aged servers as componentry is withdrawn from manufacture.
After around the five year mark the likelihood of a server breakdown, particularly disk drives, increases somewhat. So, if you have a server that is beyond your five year warranty, now is the time to plan a replacement. A hardware breakdown outside the warranty will likely result in an extended outage whilst a new machine is sourced, provisioned and installed. To help ensure business continuity it is always far better to replace an aged server well before an inevitable critical failure.
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