Hello Jeff,

For server-class gear, I tend to assume a five year service life, at
least for planning purposes.  In practice I suspect we'll keep our Sun
SPARC gear in production a couple years longer than similarly aged x86
gear.

A couple years ago our desktop team was replacing systems on a three
year cycle.  Dunno if they're still on that schedule or not.

HP 3000 upgrades have been pretty rare over here in recent memory.  The
only reason we upgraded from our 980 to a 979 is that the 980 wouldn't
run MPE/iX 6.5.

Some of the hardware on that 980 was getting pretty long in the tooth,
though... we had all of the (numerous) drives in the system volume
group, and LDEV 1 was on either an Eagle or a Coyote (I forget).  Our
3rd party support technician was so nervous about that configuration
that he kept a spare for LDEV 1 in his garage, just waiting for The
Call.  We lucked out though, and converted to the 979 before that
particular failure happened.


Edward Berner


-----Original Message-----
From: OpenMPE Support Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jeff Kubler
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 11:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How long???


To all;
Appreciate everyone's response.  I wondered if anyone is a aware of a 
"rule of thumb" that most would use for the average life that might 
be safely expected from a computer system?  For instance, how often 
should one plan to upgrade your computer systems?  Prior to HP 
foolish termination of the life of the HP 3000, what had been the 
normal practice for upgrading your HP 3000's?

Thanks,
Jeff