Death Of A Server

One of my servers died recently. A few days prior to that, there was something very odd with its clock, which was stuck between 03:14:31 and 03:14:35. Then on its last day, it suffered a kernel panic. After a hardware power cycle, the server never came back up. It’s like it suffered a heart attack, and CPR and defribillation failed to resuscitate it.

Well, this was an old hardware, probably almost 8 years old. That’s somewhat aged considering that nowadays desktop computers are changed every 3 years and servers maybe lasting just slightly longer. You might have heard of Moore’s Law. This is not what the original Moore’s Law states, but basically performance will double every 18 months, or the price will be halved. It’s no wonder that it makes sense to upgrade our tech toys frequently.

In fact, nowadays the ideas pushed by the green people are also saying that old computers consume too much power. With rising oil prices, the cost of keeping an old computer running might exceed the cost of buying a new one, particularly also considering the increased performance of newer hardware (and hence possibly reducing the number of new hardware required).

Once upon a time, servers had personalities. At least, (crazy) system administrators make pretend that their servers have a mind and soul. But nowadays, they are just numbers in a spreadsheet: performance benchmark scores, total cost of ownership, cost-per-SPECmark, cost-per-GB, etc.