Proliant DL380 G6 support contract or server upgrade

[jsmartin]

Hello,

We are using Proliant DL380 G6 servers acquired in 2010 which already ran out of their 3 year Care Pack service and we are analyzing if we need to upgrade to G8 servers or only extend the warranty to "HP 6 Hour Call-To-Repair HW Support", our doubts are:

- Is there a maximum lifetime or maximum usage for our current servers (Proliant DL380 G6)?

- After initial 3 year care pack has expired, could there be an availability problem with replacement parts under "HP 6 Hour Call-To-Repair HW Support " contract?

- Would it be recommended to replace servers for G8 versions or to keep them renewing support contract?

Thanks.

Regards,

Javier San Martin

[waaronb]

It depends on your budget and your server needs, I'd say.

If you're happy with the performance of the G6's and you can afford to renew a support pack, then that's the way to go.

If you're ready for an upgrade anyway like you need more CPU/memory/whatever and that's budgeted, that's the way to go.  Or if you're starting to notice parts failing on the older servers, maybe it's more worthwhile for a hardware refresh rather than fixing up an old server.

Companies might typically plan for a 3-5 year life for servers... I shoot for 5 years myself which means during the initial purchase, I'm trying to plan 5 years ahead and see if the server is expandable enough during that time to make it work.  Whether that's being able to grow the drive size, add extra memory, or even swap to faster CPU's.  After 5 years though, if our needs are still growing, then it's probably a better option to merely upgrade to a new server to take advantage of the latest processors or memory technology.

Another thing to consider is consolidating physical servers to virtuals.  I recently retired about 10 old DL360 and DL380 G5 servers, replacing with 3 new DL380 Gen8s running Hyper-V, and all those old physical boxes became virtual machines.  They run faster, have more memory, better drive performance (even as virtual disks).  And when I showd off a graph of our power consumption from our colocation, they were duly impressed at the halving of our power footprint.

If you colocate and have to pay monthly for space and power, the benefits of consolidating like that have an even more visible impact.

FYI, I don't work for HP but I'm pretty sure you can still get a support contract for a DL380 G6.  I could be wrong, but they love selling support and I can't imagine them saying no.