Is it just me or is there some kind of conspiracy in the air right now? In the last few weeks pretty much every IT news and online resource I use has carried an article on the dangers of aging hardware. I attended a shin-dig just this Thursday where one speaker managed to get a reference in to the topic as well despite it not being on the agenda. However as he was from one of the hardware companies I suspect it’s always on his agenda.
Is this just a chance confluence of events? Or is the hardware industry trying to drum up trade using scare tactics? You gotta know which one I favour.
You see I am employed to get a job done, and to get it done at the lowest overall cost to the company who employ me as I can. We are not a charitable foundation established to keep Hewlett Packard or Dell sales bonuses high for Christmas so little Timmy can have an iPad. We are here to align the business need to the available technology. And if, in hardware terms, that means 5 year old technology then that is just what I will use.
Let’s talk about the environment. I like “sustainable ICT”. I follow the mantra of all the Rs. (or is that a mantra that’s all a load of arse? I do struggle to remember these days)
Reuse
Repair
Repurpose
Refurbish
Recycle
Replace
But it makes economic sense as well. I am particularly fond of HP’s DC7600. It’s a desktop PC from maybe 4 years ago. I own a couple of hundred of them. And I bought maybe 50 more of them off eBay for £70 a pop. They are the backbone of my workforce PCs. They slog on and they do the job. They require no hardware maintenance because (and I hate to sound like I am the HP fanboi here) HP built them well, very well. We bought cheap RAM, and didn’t scrimp on CPU when we bought them and guess what? They run Vista and W7 just fine. We don’t permit local storage of data and our principal business applications are web delivered (hey I can maybe pass this off as private cloud and look tech-sexy?) so the tiny hard drives common to desktops 4, 5, 6 years ago work fine for me. They aren’t great if you have users who need a power user type machine or workstation so for those users we give them a new (or at least newer) PC. Job done. Seriously, we have had one pop a fan, and one fail a HDD, and that’s about the lot.
I hear people bleating about difficulty of managing old PCs. Well, you are doing it wrong then. We got off XP and W2K because W2K is old and sucks and XP does not enable a lot of the ace features in Windows Server 2008. We had a business case, we went for it. Also a nice thing is that “longhorn” era OS are hardware agnostic. One image to rule them all my precious. And get your patching, updates, inventory management up to scratch and you can manage an estate of disparate hardware of various vintage and it’s no real bother. There are some great tools from Microsoft to help you do this, as well as a bunch from freeware and cheap third parties.
I hear further bleating (or scaremongering) about the fact that these old PCs are terribly insecure. This is on the assumption that you are running a mish-mash of badly patched semi-obsolete OS platforms and so forth. There is no reason you can’t run a decent OS on an old PC. The FOSS camp will encourage you to run some Red Hat or Ubuntu estate, carefully crafted to maximise performance but I don’t think you get the easy management that way. Prove me wrong and I’ll become a convert. Pick the OS which works for your shop. Avoid bloaty security products and stick to the ones which do what needs to be done and you’ll have the resources to run a secure network on old kit. Also the older PCs won’t have come with DVD writers and so forth as default, non-delete options so you are at a lower risk of data theft. Use W7/WS2008R2 group policy to manage data via USB and you are golden. Older kit with a CD ROM only is actually more secure!
Energy use is often cited as a reason to replace your old kit. While I am committed to every possible avenue to reduce energy consumption in my business (especially in our data centre where power = heat = more air conditioning = more expense = more power used = power circuit upgrades = more expense etc.) I am unconvinced by the argument that I need to rip and replace to save a fortune on PC desktop power consumption. I have looked at people presenting figures on this in the past and on each occasion I found the numbers to be flawed or just plain wrong. The last one I looked at actually worked back to say that our PCs used 40% more power than the whole power consumption of our company in total. Beware the “assumptions” people build into these proposals. If you have a nice modern OS and a nice modern server OS then you can manage Windows Power Management by group policy, and do it moderately well. The newer the combo of client and server the better the results seem to be but this is still an area where the real world application falls short of the advertising. Good power management is important for good patching. Wake on LAN has to work.
This whole thing is starting to be less relevant because of the cloud. Some CIO of note who’s name and company I immediately forgot says that Windows 7 will be the last mass OS deployment. In the same way that many (including Bill Gates interestingly enough) predict that Blue Ray will be the last disc based distribution format. Certainly the variety of devices upon which corporate data is being accessed is broadening daily. And I have to ask if you can pick up email and review a word document on a 600Mhz processer mobile phone why do you suddenly need 4 GB RAM and a 4 GHz processor to do the same job on a PC?
The workforce we manage tomorrow will be working in very different ways, or they will be Chinese. I doubt very much that the PC platform and the traditional server hardware will be what we are talking about with any great relevance, not in the mainstream of IT services anyway. This push for hardware sales is possibly a death throw of an old industry. Look how the big PC manufacturers are repositioning themselves as “business services” and cloud providers and the like. Look how IBM, HP, Dell and the like have been reshaping their businesses. I think that probably tells you as much about the importance of the old fashioned hardware refresh as does my ramblings...
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