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A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got a

by cduzz 3y ago

A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates. I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing. Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.

CapeTheory 3y ago
Do you happen to have a preferred source for these 3-year old off-lease servers?
Slartie 3y ago
> A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. Exactly. I am running a server at Hetzner which has a CPU that was discontinued about 7 years ago. I don't know the exact age of the machine because it was already used when I got it 4 years ago, but based on the CPU availability it's at least 7 or 8 years old, potentially even older. Nothing on that machine has failed in the last 4 years except for HDDs (the spinning platter type), which are immediately swapped when broken, RAID rebuilds, everything's fine. 3 years is no time for hardware nowadays. It can live much longer, especially if storage is solid-state. And the performance improvements often aren't substantial enough to warrant a swap within anything shorter than 5 or 6 years.