by Jarom Renfeld
Your server hardware is a ticking time bomb. Now you may never have a catastrophic disaster where the server melts-down and takes all your data with it, but one day sooner or later your server will become obsolete. The older your hardware is, the more likely failures are to occur and with it a loss of business productivity. IT experts recommend replacing servers every three years.
Here are some signs your server needs upgrading:
1. Out of warranty: We recommend maintaining the warranty on all servers.
2. The software is no longer supported: Microsoft discontinued support for Windows XP back in April, and has also stopped supporting Server 2003, Exchange 2003, Office 2003, and will stop supporting Server 2003 R2 next year. This alone significantly increases a business’s risk for viruses, hackers, and overall data loss.
3. It is slow: If your Disk, CPU, or Ram are exceeding 80% utilization, it’s time for an upgrade. Slow servers mean a less productive work force.
4. It sucks up your time: Managing older servers takes more time and resources.
5. It is noisy: Fans and hard drives get noisier with age, and will often become significantly louder before a failure.
6. There is no more room: Are you running out of space on your server?
7. Impaired Performance: Does the server freeze up? Are there occasional hiccups? These may be signs that the server is running up against the limits of its performance and most businesses have a hard time tracking these issues until it’s too late. We recommend monitoring tools that report on the health and status of your servers.
Small businesses tend see their server as one piece of equipment, both the hardware and software being one. Yet the server operating system and the business applications it runs can have new versions released every year or two. Software vendors would have their customers upgrade with every new release, and this upgrade process is called a migration.
A migration can be from version to version, or from an old server to a new one. Many software vendors only support migrating from one version to the next. Unfortunately most small businesses only purchase the new version when they upgrade the server hardware. This can cause a problem when two or more versions of software have been skipped before upgrading.
Your business needs an IT Migration Specialist when there is no supported migration path from your software version to the current version, or you just want to ensure the migration is done right! These professionals have the experience, tools, and skills to perform a seamless migration beyond that of typical IT Technicians.
When done right a migration can be performed off-line leaving the original servers intact. In addition a professional migration can be executed on both the hardware and software at the same time with no downtime for your business.
Jarom Renfeldt is the founder and President of JR-Tech, a Migration Expert and an IT services leader, serving businesses in the Inland Empire for over 10 years.