Here in 2026, we're retaining old systems instead of discarding them

I mentioned recently that at work, we're retaining old systems that we would have normally discarded. We're doing this for the obvious reason that new servers have become increasingly expensive, due to escalating prices of RAM (especially DDR5 RAM) and all forms of SSDs, especially as new servers might really require us to buy ones that support U.2 NVMe instead of SATA SSDs (because I'm not sure how available SATA SSDs are these days).

Our servers are generally fairly old anyways, so our retention takes two forms. The straightforward one is that we're likely going to slow down completely pushing old servers out of service. Instead, we'll keep them on the shelf for if we want test or low importance machines, and along with that we're probably going to be more careful about which generation of hardware we use for new machines. We've traditionally simply used the latest hardware any time we turn over a machine (for example, updating it to a new Ubuntu version), but this time around a bunch of those will reuse what we consider second generation hardware or even older hardware for machines where we don't care too much if it's down for a day or two.

The second form of retention is that we're sweeping up older hardware that other groups at the university are disposing of, when in the past we'd have passed on the offer or taken only a small number of machines. For example, we just inherited a bunch of Supermicro servers and Lenovo P330 desktops (both old enough that they use DDR4 RAM), and in the past we'd have taken only a few of each at most. These inherited servers are likely to be used as part of what we consider 'second generation' hardware, equivalent to Dell R340s and R240s (and perhaps somewhat better in practice), so we'll use them for somewhat less important machines but ones where we still actually care.

(A couple of the inherited servers have already been reused as test servers.)

The hardware we're inheriting is perfectly good hardware and it'll probably work reliably for years to come (and if not, we have a fair number of spares now). But it's hardware with several years of use and wear already on it, and there's nothing special about it that makes it significantly better than the sort of second generation hardware we already have. However, we're looking at a future where we may not be able to afford to get new general purpose 1U servers and our current server fleet is all we'll have for a few years, even as some of them break or increasingly age out. So we're hoarding what we can get, in case. Maybe we won't need them, but if we do need them and we pass them up now, we'll really regret it.

(The same logic applies to the desktops. We don't have any immediate, obvious use for them, but at the same time they're not something we could get a replacement for if we pass on them now. We'll probably put a number of them to use for things we might not have bothered with it we had to get new machines; for example, I may set one up as a backup for my vintage 2017 office desktop.)

I suspect that there will be more of this sort of retention university-wide, whether or not the retained hardware gets used in the end. We're not in a situation where we can assume a ready supply of fresh hardware, so we'd maybe better hold on to what we have if it still works.