That old server is starting to act up and dipping in performance. What do you do? Invest in new server? Continue to baby it till it dies (hopefully you have a good backup and the software available to recover) and then purchase a new one? Do you invest in a tech to come out and resolve the issues putting band aids on? These of course are some options and I hope that you do not take the chance and wait for the serer to crash to get a new risking loss of data and extensive down times. Before you decide to invest in another server are you sure that you are utilizing that server to its full hardware capabilities? Here are some tips to help you decide.
1. Performance Indicators
Is your server running at least 70-80% capacity during the busy hours of your business and at least 40% on the slowest times? You can check this through Microsoft's performance monitors and other third party monitors. Most businesses are under utilizing their servers and waisting valuable resources and instead of using what they still have available they are purchasing new servers.
2. Invest In Monitoring Software
This is a necessity and highly recommended! Monitoring will tell you in advance if something is going down hill and ready to fail. It will also give details of performance in hardware and will give you the ability to see what is going on with server performance in a more detailed scale. There are lots of monitoring products out on the net that range from free to expensive. Products such as Ground Works Opens Source which has a free community edition to products such as N-Able which you pay a fee on. Whatever you go with chose the one that will benefit you and your network and provide you with the best possible reports on your network performance and will help you tweak to squeeze more performance out of your server.
3. What Applications are Running
Knowing what is running on your server and turning off unneeded services and applications can greatly reduce the amount of resources you use, freeing up those resources for the applications you need to function properly. Virtualizing can significantly increase the performance of your applications! Look through your server and make sure you need what is running on the server. I have seen old software running on servers that is no longer in use and can be removed. Even some of the server services that are running can be safely disabled releasing those resources to more important things.
4. Do You Know For Sure if Its Time to Upgrade
If you have taken the time to look at the above steps and your server is still running at 80% capacity then it is time to invest in a new server. Decide whether or not to upgrade between software upgrades. Check the minimum requirements if you are deciding to upgrade to the newest software. Some software upgrades can significantly be different between versions so keep an keen eye on them.
Avoiding massive upgrades of servers can be prevented by making sure that a defrag has been ran on the system. Cleaning out old documents and data and archiving them to CD /DVD or and external hard drive. Weekly maintenance will significantly increase the life of your servers and reduce the downtimes. One final tip. Hardware failures are always on the horizon no product is perfect and not all hardware lasts forever. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE GOOD BACKUPS! Ensure that you make regular test restores to ensure your disaster recovery is a success.
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