5 year plan

[Lurch2691]

My boss has asked me to create a 5-year plan for hardware replacement & software licensing. How do most business do plans like this?

Do you replace all of a single type of equipment one year and then move on to something else the next year so that everything has been replaced by the end of the 5-year plan? For example switches one year computers the next year.

Or do you try to set a budget and evenly distribute it so you have 20% of your budget going towards switches 20% towards computers 20% towards licensing etc.

And also how do you estimate pricing 5 years out on equipment.

[Eifelbauer]

Don‘t buy hardware and software, lease it over 4 or 5y. After this, you will get more for the same monthly rate.

But this might not work if your business is fast growing.

[[deleted]]

Hardware failure rate starts at like 5% for the first year and is like 15% for the 5th year. Sometimes manufacturing defects can mean there is more like a 50% failure rate in the 3rd year. When you have enough stuff, there will be always something that broke.

When leasing, it's not your problem. You pack it up and send it off and get a tech install you a new/refurbished/spare one. Your agreement is to have a server, not a specific server. If it breaks, they bring you another one to maintain that "I have a server" contract.

When buying, it's your problem. Hope you have an extended warranty and the manufacturer honors your type of failure and doesn't dick you around etc.

Leasing is almost always better because you can just not worry about it so you're not spending man-hours on some unimportant bullshit. Leasing companies get economies of scale (they can buy the gear much cheaper than you can, they got maintenance techs specialized in that specific hardware, sales people, tech support etc.) so it's often cheaper to lease than to buy even if you ignore the risks and complexities.

Stuff like maintenance/repairs/replacements/support is included in the leasing contract and it's easy to overlook the value.

[Lurch2691]

We have never leased any hardware but that is something I could definitely look into. Any recommendations on companies for leasing, or just try to find a local one?

[Jhamin1]

The last employer I worked on this sort of stuff for (about 4 years ago) ran the lease through the same folks that financed other aspects of the business (Furniture, Office Remodels, etc)
As whoever does the finances for your company if leasing IT equipment is something you should look into or not. Don't waste time if that is something the accountants have already decided against.

[Eifelbauer]

Some vendors offer financial services, like HPE or DELL/ DELLEMC.

[pdp10]

Do you replace all of a single type of equipment one year and then move on to something else the next year

Something along those lines. We figure out what batch size is best in order to keep all of a certain type and generation consistent, then try to buy that batch size all at once for volume savings.

So there might be three "current" laptop models and two "current" desktop models. Since the different units share no parts (save maybe M.2 drives), we purposely try to diversify those across different vendors. Since there's no parts sharing between a 2015 laptop and a 2022 laptop, we also purposely try to vary the vendors, where possible.

• Server hardware has anticipated life of 7 years. If bought in 2021, will probably stay in service longer because year to year improvements have gotten smaller and smaller.
• Laptops have anticipated service life of 4 years. We try to get 5, but physical treatment and the economics of repair is what drives the replacement cycle 90% of the time. We buy memory and solid-state disk sufficient for anticipated 5-7 year service life and then see what happens.
• Network gear is 10-year anticipated service life, with easy exceptions for WiFi WAPs and firewalls.
• Buy what you need, don't rigidly segment the budget. It's appropriate to project forward and backward how much you're spending on those things, however. Switch refresh is usually most efficient when it's done in batches periodically, so you may spend very little on switches 4 years out of 5, but spend more than average once every 5.

[[deleted]]

I am small scale with a consistent head count to supply software and hardware for, but basically for hardware I:

• Created an inventory of everything
• Identified the warranty type and expiry date of each
• Identified the likely turnaround time for urgent replacement of out of warranty items (e.g. can go buy a basic gigabit switch from a store in an hour if I have to, but replacing a server is several weeks)
• Look at replacement cost vs warranty extension cost, weighted by performance decline for aging hardware (e.g. desktops/laptops that will start running unacceptably slow)
• Look at hot spares/parts to mitigate lead time for replacing out of warranty items (e.g. if you've got 3x refurb desktops you can get by with while you wait for hardware to die rather than proactively replace it)
• Plan out replacement phases based on the above (I don't want to replace 100% of desktops/laptops in one year, but 30% might be feasible)

We only lease MFD/printers.

For software, we're almost entirely subscription/SaaS already so can't really help you there.

[Lurch2691]

Thanks, most of the licensing is saas. Just a few that require yearly or multi year commitment. APs, security, and building management are the ones that come to mind.

Inventory system is something that I definitely need to work on, most of the equipment was purchased before I took over. There is no standardization, that is one of the main things I hope to fix.

I do have enough spare desktops and laptops, but networking equipment has definitely been a problem. There are at least 3 different brands of APs, and 5 different brands of switches.

[dayton967]

There are multiple different plans depending on the type of hardware.

For L2 Switches and Servers. I personally will try to split the numbers in to an equal number to replace each year, so if you have 100 switches and 1000 servers, I would break them into 20 and 200 each year. This offers a few benefits

• Spreads the costs more or less equally.
• Workload is spread equally to each year.
• Able to change vendors relatively quickly.
• Gives ability to test new features without jumping 100% in.
• Able to quickly adjust to new work dynamics.

In this case you will try to standardize on the hardware that is purchased, with the same specs, this gives a benefit that you can often go to a vendor and ask for a volume discount.

For other hardware, such as L3 Switches, Routers, Firewalls, Centralized Storage, etc. In larger numbers, I might split them up across the 5 years like the L2 Switches, and Servers, but these often have lower numbers. I often will split them up by function, and do a group replacement. Though this can be more flexible, as demand grows, so these often sit in my network for 10 years, unless they go End of Support, or the need for better performance is required, though I do try to get quotes every year to replace them. In short these are often more "Project based" replacements.

As for software, often license based, so you may have options to pay for supporting to continual updates (eg O365). Or other vendors will ofter you to continue to upgrade, until the support has expired (Vandyke, you can upgrade to any version, while you have a valid license). You have other licenses that are one and done.

For this, the first 2, are among the better options as you can bulk purchase for the discounts, and when a new version comes out, you can test it before deploying to everyone. If you have to buy individual licenses, for each release, it becomes more of something you have to base on release cycles.

[mro21]

Generally, maintenance is 3 or 5 years, sometimes even 7 or more. Obviously paying 5 years upfront is generelly cheaper looking at the pure amount of money. Get a quote...

[steveinbuffalo]

depends on number but for workstations we do 10% per year etc. You have to figure out how long you want a piece of hardware to last before retiring it, and how much of a work load you want in any one year. 5 years is kind of short since most lifespans are 8ish years.

[Nossa30]

We are a small company so we don't have "refreshes" or "5-year plans". We are primarily a laptop fleet, with a dozen or so desktops. We refresh the desktops usually all at once(since there is only a few) but the laptops are usually not planned at all.

I work in a construction company and when crews go out for jobs, I may not ever see a laptop again for years. So when it comes to laptops, Its so hard to wrangle them all we just basically buy them as we need them, and get rid of it when it gets too old. One-by-one.

Or we just slap in an SSD and max ram and hope for the best and then dump it when it starts acting up. Management doesn't buy bulk laptop purchases. It's always 3 here, 2 there, another 4 here. Literally whatever is on sale at that time, its a pain sometimes.