You've already figured it out - math and financials. Do the math, show statistics. If they don't care about the downtime, it happens. It's also worth noting t

You've already figured it out - math and financials. Do the math, show statistics. If they don't care about the downtime, it happens. It's also worth noting that, depending on the age of the CTO, "4 cores, 8 gigs" might seem like enough for anybody. It seems like a hell of a lot to me - I still can't believe that we have mobile phones four times as fast as my first PC and ten times as fast as my first computer, with more RAM than I ever had harddrive space. I'm not saying it's not needed, but man we've come a long way.