WARNING - File Servers Don't Last Forever!

Recently our area had some severe weather.  After 25 years in business, we've been conditioned to expect a flood of calls from businesses whose servers have failed the next morning as a result.  Sometimes the failure was caused by water damage, sometimes a power surge caused it to fail but many times it's just a matter of an old server that  has been kept in service too long and the environmental issues caused by the storm just tipped an already wobbly server into a full-fledged failure. 

I don't know why but some business owners who conscientiously change out vehicles and other equipment on a regular replacement schedule for some reason expect their network servers to last 10 years or more. 

Ladies and Gentleman, it's time for a reality check.  Servers aren't expected to last that long!  When you push a server beyond its useful life you risk the lifeblood of your business (your data).  Don't tempt fate.  Resist the urge to get "one more year" out of your server.  If you do, eventually it will fail and the recovery consequences could be much more expensive than keeping your server infrastructure up-to-date in the first place.

A recent example was a client that called us because their in-house IT tech announced that their server had died and he couldn't get any usable data from its hard drives.  To compound the problem, the tech also revealed that he just discovered that their tape backup had not worked correctly in months so there was no usable backup.  They wanted to know if we could possibly recover their data from the drives and then re-build their server.  They were poised to send the drives to a very expensive national recovery service that was going to charge between $8,000 - $10,000 to TRY to recover their data.

I don't have enough space to itemize all of the failures that led to this catastrophe so I won't belabor that point. That tech feels bad enough, I'm sure.

The bottom line was they had trusted all of their critical business data to a 10 year old server and the on-board disk drive controller hadn't just failed.  It had started scrambling all of the data well before it finally gave up in a puff of smoke.

Fortunately, we asked for and received 24 hours to see if our recovery center could resurrect their data from the scrambled hard drives and we got about 90% of their data back for a tiny fraction of what that national company was going to charge.  But, 10% was still totally trashed and beyond repair.  That data will have to be recreated clerically from scratch at who knows what cost.

Servers have an expected useful life.  After that time, the risk of something going wrong grows exponentially every year your server is kept in service.  How long is the useful life of a server?  The replacement rule of thumb to use is the manufacturers warranty period plus 1 or 2 years.  If the manufacturer warranty is 3 years, you're pushing your luck if you take your server beyond the age of 5.  If your manufacturer only offers a 1 year warranty, that should send up a red flag on how long they expect that server to last. 

If you try to stretch server life beyond its useful life, you increase the risk of failure dramatically but perhaps just as importantly you risk not being able to find replacement parts for your server.  Don't expect to find a ready supply of parts for your old server.  Technology changes too quickly to count on finding a replacement for your 7 year old hard drive.  At best you might find a used part of questionable quality from a computer scrapper on e-bay. 

I have a better chance of finding replacement parts for my 48 year old Ford Mustang than you have of finding parts for your 7 year old server.

The risk grows even greater if you bought a home-made server which are frequently called "white box" servers.  Unlike branded servers from  companies like Hewlett Packard or Dell, white box servers are almost always a mix of parts from different manufacturers who each have different warranty and replacement part policies. Getting parts will be a pain in the  neck! 

Here's an example of a recent white box server failure.  ACT was recently asked to resurrect 2 failed white box servers that were about 7 years old.  The power supplies in both had failed.  The motherboards required a special power plug connector that only one power supply company made.  After a few years,  that supplier discontinued that power supply and none of their current models had a matching plug. All attempts to find matching power supplies failed and the client was faced with the real possibility of never getting those servers running again for lack of that one part.  Transplanting the hard drives to another server was not viable for technical reasons. Some fancy solder work by our tech staff to 
jury-rig another power supply to match the motherboard plug got the servers up long enough to retrieve their data.  (We don't recommend this as a long term fix.) 

Name brand server makers like Dell and HP do a marginally better job of keeping replacement components for their equipment but because technology turns over so fast in our industry even they have problems with parts availability after a few years.

Take my advice, check the purchase date of your server.  Check its warranty expiration.  If your server is over 2 years older than the warranty, start shopping for a new server now before it's too late.

Here's a tip for all of you server buyers.  Remember the old adage "Buy what appreciates and lease what depreciates."  Nothing depreciates faster than computers.  Lease financing rates are extraordinarily low now and leasing your servers takes the hassle of coming up with a big chunk of cash for a new server every 4 or 5 years.  It also puts you into a nice easy monthly payment plan that will keep your servers up-to-date with regular replacements on a regular schedule.  For example, a well-provisioned HP Proliant server with Windows Server 2012 including installation can be leased for about $100 per month with no end-of-lease buyout fee.

Need help recovering data from a dead server or PC, contact ACT Network Solutions at (847) 639-7000 or by e-mail at support@act4networks.com.  ACT can also replace your old server with a new HP Proliant tower or rack server using HP direct pricing.