We just got the numbers for maintenance next year for our EVA. And, as I sort of suspected, Year 4 begins the painful payments. This seems to be a bit of a trend in the industry. Everyone Knows that hardware should be replaced on a 3-year cycle. But reality means that a server gets pulled back from high performance production work after 3ish years and redeployed as a mid-line or low-line server for the 2-3 years it has left.
Hardware companies know this. They now have almost two decades of PC experience now, and know how the replacement cycle works. This is why 'extended maintenance' on something generally costs a heckova lot. I ran into this at OldJob as well, as a certain key server was taking too long to cut over to the new hardware and we had to extend the premier expensive support another year, and ended up taking it on the chin.
In this case, the Maintenance cost for another year on the EVA is about a third the purchase cost of a new one. This is intentional I believe. HP doesn't want to maintain old hardware longer than they have to, and therefore provide incentive for customers to stay current. As it happens we had been looking at ways to in-place upgrade the EVA to a newer model that can handle larger hard drives.
Part of the specific problem with this university is finance. Because we're a public university in Washington State, the monies that can be used for financial commitments beyond a two year horizon is devilishly hard to obtain. We're funded through a mix of state funding, Alumni giving, a blizzard of grant money (most of it requires renewal each year), and other philanthropic giving. Money that can be used for payments longer than the two-year fiscal period has to come from State funds, and those by all internal accounts haven't increased bar inflationary increases (and sometimes not even those) in a very long time.
Because of our financial situation, we can't use certain instruments available to spread out the pain that other institutions and businesses can use. OldJob was a great fan of three year leases (they were moving to four due to server replacement realities). We can't encumber funds from year to year as a way to save up for big purchases. We can't issue bonds. Everything except for a base few items that make it into the general budget have to be purchased cash, or cash over two years.
This, by the way, is what scuttled the Sophos bid for our AntiVirus/AntiSpam contract. They refused to give us a bid with a two year contract, insisting that a three year contract was better. The three year contract did indeed cost a lot less than anyone else. But the RFP specifically said "2 year contract", Sophos did not meet that, and Sophos was dropped from consideration.
We have a lot of older ML530 (G2 I think) still in various forms of service. This is a machine with a 1GHz CPU in it, to give you an idea of how old it is. They're also really big, so only four of them fit into a rack. This makes me twitch, but they'll be leaving us in the not too distant future. I'm betting that HP will be cranking up the maintenance renewals on those to painful levels sometime in the next 12 months, which will help expedite their departures.
Not that we have the money to replace them.
Hardware companies know this. They now have almost two decades of PC experience now, and know how the replacement cycle works. This is why 'extended maintenance' on something generally costs a heckova lot. I ran into this at OldJob as well, as a certain key server was taking too long to cut over to the new hardware and we had to extend the premier expensive support another year, and ended up taking it on the chin.
In this case, the Maintenance cost for another year on the EVA is about a third the purchase cost of a new one. This is intentional I believe. HP doesn't want to maintain old hardware longer than they have to, and therefore provide incentive for customers to stay current. As it happens we had been looking at ways to in-place upgrade the EVA to a newer model that can handle larger hard drives.
Part of the specific problem with this university is finance. Because we're a public university in Washington State, the monies that can be used for financial commitments beyond a two year horizon is devilishly hard to obtain. We're funded through a mix of state funding, Alumni giving, a blizzard of grant money (most of it requires renewal each year), and other philanthropic giving. Money that can be used for payments longer than the two-year fiscal period has to come from State funds, and those by all internal accounts haven't increased bar inflationary increases (and sometimes not even those) in a very long time.
Because of our financial situation, we can't use certain instruments available to spread out the pain that other institutions and businesses can use. OldJob was a great fan of three year leases (they were moving to four due to server replacement realities). We can't encumber funds from year to year as a way to save up for big purchases. We can't issue bonds. Everything except for a base few items that make it into the general budget have to be purchased cash, or cash over two years.
This, by the way, is what scuttled the Sophos bid for our AntiVirus/AntiSpam contract. They refused to give us a bid with a two year contract, insisting that a three year contract was better. The three year contract did indeed cost a lot less than anyone else. But the RFP specifically said "2 year contract", Sophos did not meet that, and Sophos was dropped from consideration.
We have a lot of older ML530 (G2 I think) still in various forms of service. This is a machine with a 1GHz CPU in it, to give you an idea of how old it is. They're also really big, so only four of them fit into a rack. This makes me twitch, but they'll be leaving us in the not too distant future. I'm betting that HP will be cranking up the maintenance renewals on those to painful levels sometime in the next 12 months, which will help expedite their departures.
Not that we have the money to replace them.
At my org, our server purchases happen two ways. One, I need a new server to replace one of the aging Netware boxes, or two, there's some big software upgrade to our financial system or student management system which requires new hardware. If it's the former, that's on my department while the latter is up to the department which the software upgrade effects the most. It's not written in stone, but it's common practice around here. We just don't have the money to replace servers at such a high clip. One benefit I have with running NetWare I gather, is that I can run the entire district(4000 users) on seven servers. That includes zenworks, groupwise, printing, and a BorderManager proxy/firewall. I hope that performance level will still be there with the linux kerneled OES. I'm not sure how your organization works, but maybe you can offload some of the financial strain onto those who really need those services?
One clarification. We don't have 4000 workstations, closer to 800-900. We have 4000 potential users.
Our problem is that the departmental budgets are largely the ones that haven't moved beyond inflation for close to 20 years. Additional software, products, projects, and suchlike are funded with one-time monies like Capital requests, grants, and the like. Oh, don't get me wrong, we do ding deparments for money when we're working on stuff that just benefits them. Some departments are 'self funding' (they have their own student fees) and have a bit more resources to play with, but rules prevent those monies from being used freely.Things like PCs are a 'departmental' responsibility rather than some central authority. Though, we do make it easy for those departments to buy machines off of an 'approved config' list. Computer Labs ARE a 'central' responsibility, and I don't know how that's funded; probably Student Tech Fee.The third thing that hamstrings us is that we're a Public university in Washington State. There are laws on the books that prevents us from using certain fancy finance options like leasing. Leasing can work, but it has to be a very specific form of leasing that is excruciatingly hard to fit into our organizational structure.