[CentOS] 10 Year old IT Infrastructure

[Brian Mathis]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Giovanni P. Tirloni <tirloni at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 10, 2009, at 3:08 PM, Alan McKay wrote:
>
>>> The better solution would be to make sure you are prepared for when
>>> the hardware does fail.  Inform the client that you understand that
>>> they don't want to upgrade the servers, and that hardware failure is
>>> not a case of "if" but "when".  Lay out a plan to them describing
>>> what
>>> would happen when that occurs, and how you will make sure that their
>>> downtime is minimal.
>>
>> For the win!
>>
>> This is by far the best approach if you want to bring them along.  It
>> has to be THEIR decision, so the best way to get them to make that
>> decision is to sit back and say "OK, if you don't want to upgrade that
>> is fine, but we still have to make sure we are prepared for when that
>> hardware fails, so here is what we'll do ..."
>>
>> That will probably scare the crap out of them enough to change their
>> minds :-)
>
> Can you get something like the average lifespan of the circuits in
> hours ?
>
> There should be something saying that in the best case scenario the
> processor can work X thousand hours and die. Although I don't know
> where that information could be available :-)
>
> -Giovanni
>

You are thinking too technically-minded.  This is a business decision,
not a technical one.  Numbers on how long components last are
irrelevant to this conversation.  The only point that needs to be made
is that a failure can be expected, and to plan business operations
around that.

Another point in this is that no matter what they do, there is a cost
to maintaining an infrastructure.  Buying new servers does not
eliminate the risk of hardware failure, and doesn't necessarily delay
it either.  These kind of plans should be in place with the new or old
servers.

Also, when I say "describe what would happen", I'm not talking about
how a board might blow a capacitor, I'm talking about how you will
react and what the impact is on the business during that time.