{"id":11421,"date":"2019-03-15T08:16:02","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T21:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/?p=11421"},"modified":"2019-03-15T08:16:02","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T21:16:02","slug":"sysadmins-want-server-reliability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/sysadmins-want-server-reliability","title":{"rendered":"SysAdmins Want Reliable Servers, not ‘Features’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you ever see the movie “What Women Want?<\/a>” In the film, Mel Gibson gets the ability to read women’s minds, and realizes what he thought they wanted was wrong all along.<\/p>\n

Well, if someone had the ability to read a SysAdmin’s mind (What a power!) they’d hear something like this: “I don’t care about server features at all, I just want it to be dependable.”\u00a0You’d also hear a lot of griping about dumb users<\/a> and fax machines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, we don’t need mind powers to know this – just the recent results from a Spiceworks survey<\/a> of\u00a01,663 IT professionals. After all, statistics is a kind of super power.<\/p>\n

Of the survey respondents, 20 per cent said when purchasing a new server, dependability was the most important consideration. Not surprising, considering how much people\u00a0love<\/em>\u00a0unexpected server outages and failures.<\/p>\n

The second-most important thing? The cost, at 17 per cent. This also isn’t a surprise, given the often sizable cost for new server equipment.<\/p>\n

But what was<\/em> surprising\u00a0was how little people cared about features. This came dead last as a consideration, with a paltry one percent of respondents calling this a top priority.\u00a0Energy efficiency trailed at two per cent.<\/p>\n

It seems IT pros don’t care about bells and whistles – just the tech running smoothly.<\/p>\n

If your customer support is good, your server doesn’t need to be<\/h4>\n

Think your customer support doesn’t matter? Think again. A large percentage of respondents said quality support mattered to them more<\/em> than the actual product.<\/p>\n

If you resell hardware, that number is really interesting. It means for a large chunk of your customers, the support you offer is more important than the reliability of the product or the cost you sell it at.<\/p>\n

Combine these three elements – reliability, cost for value, and customer service – and you’ve got a magical trifecta. The survey results say this will get you a lot farther than pushing features or energy reliability.<\/p>\n

Upgrading your server: when you should do it<\/h4>\n

It can be hard to know when to replace your server, or one of your client’s servers, with something newer. It’s also a task nobody wants to do – to the person doing the research and replacement, to the money-handler who has to justify the spend.<\/p>\n

Because of this, many people just put it in the “too hard” basket and wait until it breaks. But this is a major mistake. Unlike a car, you don’t want to wait until you hear a funny noise and take it in for a service. With server hardware failure, the risks include:<\/p>\n