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Got an email from a small business director of IT asking a question:

“We’ve got about 100 servers and we’re talking about instead of having a support contract putting that money towards buying new servers, with that in mind, what’s the oldest DL380 you would keep and what would you get rid of and why?

In summary, we have:

13 DL380 G2s

23 DL380 G3s

27 DL380 G4s

54 DL380 G5s and G6s…..”

A great question and as ever, there’s the industry standard response which I could sense any sales guy or server guy familiar with virtualization would say is, why not virtualize them on to 16 blades or fewer newer servers. Virtualize and consolidate what you have, many of the systems you have running on the older servers can probably operate quite happily in a virtual machine, condensing those 13 DL380G2s on to one or a few newer servers running Hyper-V or ESX. This will depend on the application and the role, as well as a degree of internal politics, there may be reasons that you want to isolate systems, roles or applications in line with business line or operational requirements.

In terms of your question what to keep and why, I would operate a mixture of the strategies below:

1. Invest and recycle based on age. So replace the newest servers with new hardware and then recycle those servers to replace the oldest servers you have, so we would replace the DL380 G6 with a G7, take the G6 and swap it for the G2. We instantly reduce the age of your server estate and avoid deploying a new system where it isn’t needed.

2. Invest based on need, your DL380 G2 servers might just be file servers humming along working fine, in which case replacing those might not give you the most effective return on your investment, in comparison to replacing your internal application servers, your database, web or batch systems which might make a real difference. At this point though as a collector of servers, I would then swap out the oldest server that I had left to get the most benefit at the least cost. So if I swapped out a DL380 G5, I would then redeploy it to replace the next most deserving role/application.

3. Invest based on a consolidating basis, so identify roles that can be consolidated on to a more powerful server, swapping out several servers for one and then recycling and redeploying newer systems with old ones where possible.

So which servers would I prioritize to replace?

The DL380 G2, and the DL380 G3. The G2 because it lacks integrated lights out, don’t get me wrong you can fit a RIB/RILOE2 but it’s not quite as smooth or convenient as integrated lights out which became standard on the DL380 G3 and above, also they will typically be running older slower disks which will be getting more prone to failure and expensive to replace, coupled with the Pentium III processor which is getting rather old.

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