The Time Has Come To Upgrade Aging Server Fleets By TPM
The Next Platform, Thursday, June 27th, 2024
There has always been a tension in the datacenter between ever-advancing technology and the practical economic gravity of the company balance sheet.
All things being equal, some IT decision makers would be happy for servers to be used until they fail in the field, extending their useful life well beyond their economic life. Technologists, who are always eager to get the shiniest new gear to provide the best platform on which to run the company's hundreds to thousands of applications and their databases and file systems, would probably prefer to be on a two year cadence that matches the server upgrade cycle at their OEM suppliers.
The correct cadence is somewhere in the middle. And in the past year and a half, with so much of the focus in the datacenter being on accelerated computing and generative AI, less attention has been paid to the much larger fleet of iron that is actually running the businesses of the world. Several million servers across enterprises of all sizes and industries are looking a little bit rusty, and there are several million more that need to be replaced for economic as well as technical reasons.