Jan-Feb-Mar 2021

OPINION
A FORWARD-LOOKING GUIDE TO BUYING IT
EQUIPMENT FOR SMES
WORKING OUT WHEN TO UPGRADE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY IS
NOT JUST ABOUT ITS PHYSICAL CAPABILITY. SIMON MICHIE AT
PULSANT EXPLAINS WHY
Working out when to upgrade
business technology is not just
about physical capability but also
about supportability for new applications.
As many SMEs understand, components
inevitably degrade over time, leading to
unexpected interruptions and in the worstcase
scenarios, significant data loss and
the serious consequences that come with
that.
A hard drive (HDD) lasts about six years
as its spinning disks wear out after
continuous usage, while the integrity of the
data stored on an aging disk deteriorates
due to excessive wear, the presence of
contaminants, radiation and heat.
Comparing the lifetime of a solid-state
drive (SSD) is complex because its length is
greatly determined by the total terabytes of
data written onto it. As a result, in order to
minimise the risk from aging components it
is essential that the performance of
applications is monitored regularly and
SME's are up to date on the options
available to them.
If the technology had a reasonable
specification when purchased, then unless
it has become incompatible with a
company's chosen new application (more
likely due to an aging operating system
than the hardware), IT staff should be
monitoring the performance of systems
and applications and assessing whether
any perceived slow-down is affecting
employees' efficiency. User satisfaction is
crucial for the success of IT initiatives, so
performance monitoring shouldn't be
limited to tracking IT resources such as
CPU, memory, disk, etc, but all aspects of
the experience. To do this, IT operators
and administrators can assess end-user
availability and performance with the aid
of user experience monitoring software.
If the performance does remain
acceptable, then the only real driver is
reliability which is affected by ageing
components such as fragile motherboards
and on-board circuitry, power supplies or
disk drives. Keeping a close check on
reliability across all the hardware and
determining the failure rate may well make
the decision an obvious one, even if the
equipment itself is still capable of
operating the software that the business
depends upon.
ON-PREMISE VERSUS CLOUD:
THE COSTS
Housing a server on-premise is an
expensive undertaking which involves
everything from air conditioning systems to
power distribution, networking and power
backup. All of this requires significant
levels of capital investment and on-going
operating expense.
Alternatively, cloud has an array of
advantages such as greater agility, cost
savings and faster time to market. There's
no need for hardware in the virtualised
environment and businesses can pay for
storage which is cheap and easy to do.
Apart from paying for bandwidth and
connectivity, there is no cost associated
with getting data into the cloud; however,
there can be unbudgeted costs associated
with getting data out of the cloud. The
processing of information and returning
results is where costs can often start to rise.
A full move to the cloud may not always
be desirable because of concerns over
security and control and in this case, the
answer is often colocation. By moving their
servers to a trusted vendor's facility, SME's
can uphold absolute control over their
data without maintaining a costly,
dedicated, potentially insecure, in house
data centre.
The key cost advantage of colocation is
that providers host multiple customers
within each data centre, allowing them to
22 NETWORKcomputing JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 @NCMagAndAwards
WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK