Re: Advice please: Upgrade mail server or service contract?

On 12/1/05, David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Tom Jedrzejewicz wrote:
> > I would lean toward leaving the system alone as long as you can,
> > because the costs are falling.  But the key question is ... when do
> > you anticipate having to upgrade for performance or reliability
> > reasons?
>
> Capacity isn't really a problem ... my main driver for this is that I
> want to upgrade on my own schedule, not one dictated to me by a
> catastrophic failure.
>
> If the system is on maintenance, then I can count on getting it fixed
> fairly quickly.  If it's not on maintenance, then I either have to
> upgrade to a new system with downtime and the hassles of dealing with
> massive hardware changes.

Maintenance is about financial stability and about responsiveness.  If
you haven't purchased it and the system fails, you can usually call
the vendor and pay for the repair on a time-and-materials basis.  But
the expense and response time are less predictable.  Every system we
care about in my shop is on maintenance of one form or another, so
that the expenses are consistent and we know that we will get
response.

> If I upgrade before it fails, then I have the luxury of running parallel
> and verifying everything works well before pulling the trigger.

Of course you want to upgrade proactively on your schedule rather than
reactively when the circumstances require it.

Let me restate my thoughts; I suspect I wasn't clear ...

Maintenance aside, figure out when, for whatever reason, you would
most want to do the upgrade.  The traffic and disk may suggest that
the server will be reaching it's limit in a year.  But, you may want
to do the upgrade in June, when your workload is typically light.  Or
a new release of the mail software might be coming in August, so you
want to do them both at the same time.  Or perhaps your wife always
goes to Vegas with her girlfriends in April, so that is a great time
for the upgrade.  My preference is to delay these things as long as
possible to get the longest life out of existing systems and the best
bang for the replacement buck.

But the reasons are not really relevant.  Decide when you would want
to do the upgrade.  Then decide if it is worth $300 to you to delay
the upgrade until then.  If not, then do the upgrade now.  If it is,
renew the maintenance.

Take care ...

--
Tom Jedrzejewicz
tomjedrz@xxxxxxxxx