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A colleague called me up and told me how horrified he was that his enterprise was starting to “decommission G4 servers, G4s!”, if we step back a second, what he means is that the enterprise, through the CIO had ruled that anything in their data center that was older than a HP Proliant G4 was no longer supported and therefore had to be virtualized or replaced (whichever the business unit wished to action). This meant that Nigel and the team had been tasked with decommissioning and unracking a range of servers including HP Proliant G4 servers.

Nigel could not understand it based on:

• DL380 G4 has integrated lights out
• 2 Xeon processors
• 2 on board network ports
• Support for 6 disks
• Not that old if you think about it

He is absolutely right, but let me explain it this way. The CIO will typically be thinking:
Anything older than a HP Proliant G4 will have no book or asset value – it will be fully depreciated

• The hardware support costs of older servers are typically higher.
• Newer servers are typically more energy efficient as a result of the design and more efficient components – check out this post as an example
• Why pay to host a physical server if we can virtualize many DL380 G4 servers on a few DL380 G6 or the equivalent blade?
• We have to be taking the maginal cost/value approach, what is cheaper financially running older servers or gaining energy and support cost savings by refreshing the hardware and if possible combining it with virtualization.

The key point of concern for me though was an operational issue. As CIO, I need Nigel to sell the concept as much as I do, I need him to understand why we are doing this so that we all sing from the same hymn sheet, that we all understand the concepts and business benefits. The very fact that Nigel does not understand IT policy in regards to server model types, might result in unnecessary debate and business expense.

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