How long do your servers and personal computers last? How much do brand idiosyncrasies and engineered obsolescence affect your park of computers and servers? Can you diagnose and repair, or do you merely repurchase, replace and reinstall software?
Your servers and workstations should last 10 years and boot in seconds. Your laptops and desktops should be covered with next-day onsite service support for 5. They should be future-proof and their parts so robust and standard compliant that they can be replaced in minutes.
Licenses should not be lost when hardware changes (Windows® and Windows® server). You should be free to reassign them to new machines, physical or virtual, on-premises on in the cloud. Machines can be refitted or re-purposed as they age.
The server clusters we acquire and the firewall we build for our clients have the resilience and light-bulb operating simplicity that you should expect for hardware that is essential, though peripheral to your core business. They cost less to acquire and maintain than that purchased from traditional “enterprise” vendors*. They have less moving parts and customized components. They are modular. They are built according to specs and fully tested before shipment. They come with NO surprises (which makes troubleshooting a breeze).
Why replace a machine if you do not need to. Why replace a machine when you can replace or upgrade a disk, a card, or memory with off-the shelf parts, on your own and in much less time, for less money and with little or no disruption?
* The Internet economy does not rely on “enterprise” vendors (Dell, HP...).