How Do I Provide a Workstation To Last 15 Years? 655
An anonymous reader writes "My father is a veterinarian with a small private practice. He runs all his patient/client/financial administration on two simple workstations, linked with a network cable. The administration application is a simple DOS application backed by a database. Now the current systems, a Pentium 66mhz and a 486, both with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of hard drive space, are getting a bit long in the tooth. The 500MB harddrives are filling up, the installed software (Windows 95) is getting a bit flakey at times. My father has asked me to think about replacing the current setup. I do know a lot about computers, but my father would really like the new setup to last 10-15 years, just like the current one has. I just dont know where to begin thinking about that kind of systems lifetime. Do I buy, or build myself? How many spare parts should I keep in reserve? What will fail first, and how many years down the line will that happen?"
Buy any current workstation and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtualize!
Then your father's old setup can remain DOS and Win95 effectively forever, on any modern hardware. I've done this for lots of clients with legacy WinNT and Win95 systems.
The process is called "physical to virtual" (P2V) migration.
forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Industrial PCs? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about industrial hardware? You'll probably pay at least twice as much as you would for a consumer desktop, but PCs made for industrial control applications tend to be a lot more rugged and build to serve for many years in harsh conditions. Sounds like you don't need a lot of processing power, so you could probably get by with a fanless system and eliminate a major failure (and noise) source.
I haven't bought anything from these guys, so I don't personally know anything about their quality, but SuperLogics has a barebones fanless Atom-based system for $315. Something like that might be a good start.
Once again, "it depends" (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you care what OS it runs on? (It'll be harder if he wants to keep using windows 95..) For reliability, I'd suggest windows 2000, since it will also work with most recent drivers. The trick will be getting his old software working on it. However once you get the whole setup working, it will be reliable.
How much effort do you want to put into it? You could make this quite reliable by mirroring some 4gb drives, and telling your dad to replace broken ones with spares set aside. Since 4gb drives are pretty cheap, this is a relatively simple solution. (Since 15 years from 1 hard drive is pretty unlikely, use cheap replacements, since space doesn't matter)
Do you care about the speed of the machine? If the only need is to make it keep working, (no real compatibility with existing technologies) this could pretty easily be done with anything in the area of a P3 or P4. These can be pretty cheaply picked up at a lot of used computer stores.
Although, no matter what you do, you're not gonna be able to just buy an off the shelf machine and get this kinda reliability.
I have little to contribute (Score:3, Insightful)
But I'd just like to say that this is one of the most interesting "ask slashdot" questions in a long time, and I look forward to replies from my more knowledgeable peers! :D
Ok, small contribution: The dad obviously doesn't need much power, so maybe this would be a good time to make him switch from windows to a bare-bones open source solution which will be most likely to still be supported in 10-15 years, as opposed to the much shorter upgrade-and-obsolescence cycle of Redmond.
Replacement cost has drastically reduced (Score:4, Insightful)
Car built for 15 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Would your father ask you to get him a car that lasts 15 years?
I hate to say it, but lasting the designed life span of computer parts (2 years) seems to be a challenge as of late, and buying quality doesn't seem to gain much.
The failure rates now days have been getting a bit long in the tooth.
You don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
The only way you've gotten away with it is that you have one application which has a very limited required environment, and drive interfaces have only changed once. If you stick with that philosophy, and get lucky with the drives again, you may be able to get by with something similar.
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
Then use the server to push whatever app you need to some low duty desktops. You could use a web app, or a client/server desktop app. Again, you're probably good with a *nix.
Your biggest fear is drive space. In 15 years you won't be able to buy the drives you're using today, but there is no point in stockpiling them: they'll be dead in the box after 15 years. Solid state won't fail in the box (probably, but they're too new for it to have been tested) but you may have to replace them more often, depending on your utilization.
Just from personal experience, you're much better off buying a modest new system every 5 years, than a major new system every 15. It's cheaper, and the chance of a catastrophic failure are lower.
Re:You don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
Then use the server to push whatever app you need to some low duty desktops. You could use a web app, or a client/server desktop app. Again, you're probably good with a *nix.
I think that's overkill for one veterinarian.
I suggest going virtual on commodity hardware that changes out every half-decade or so. I suspect that as long as your virtual machine itself doesn't change the cost of buying hardware with the chops to run it will only decline over the years.
Or at least (Score:5, Insightful)
forever
Until the virtualization software is made obsolete by the vendor.
Re:Once again, "it depends" (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you care what OS it runs on? (It'll be harder if he wants to keep using windows 95..) For reliability, I'd suggest windows 2000, since it will also work with most recent drivers.
I'd be worried about Microsoft (or any closed source vendor) dropping support for older OSs, there may very well still be exploitable security bugs in there that could go unpatched.
Re:forget it (Score:3, Insightful)
There, problem solved.
That doesn't solve the problem, it ignores his principal request. The guy looking to buy a computer has made it clear that he doesn't want to have to replace his computer every few years; nowhere does the description say that he's looking to minimise cost. Your response is typical of IT (and other) professionals who presume to know users want, rather than listening to what they actually want.
Consider changing IT cycles. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are two possible solutions.
First is to change nothing. Why fix what isn't broke?
The second is to change your time frame entirely. 10-15 years is too long and too disruptive when the time comes, and you lose out on presumptive benefits in the middle.
Surely there are network aware applications that do what you want on standard systems today.
You want to be network aware. In todays world you do not want to be cut off from your customers, and more importantly you want to push of data integrity to others.
You should develop an annual budget for IT expenses that rolls over. You should be on a 3-5 year schedule rather than a 10-15 year schedule. If you do this, you will have more predictable costs. You won't have competitive disadvantage because of software. You will have advantages of providing more and more reliable services to your customers.
As in all businesses information and digital information can be used to extend and monetize your business in all sorts of ways. But only if you choose to keep on top of it, and you don't constrain your learning cycles to whatever is new now.
Re:forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes (most of the time) users don't know what they want, especially when it comes to IT. Many times they ask for the wrong things, and make the wrong decisions. It's our job, as IT consultants, to let them know what the best solution to the problem would be.
For example, asking, "Why do you want your setup to last fifteen years?" may yield answers like, "I don't want to deal with the costs involved with constantly upgrading" or "I'm familiar with my current system, and I am willing to change, but I don't want to have to refamiliarize myself with it every five years" or maybe even "I don't want to have to pay for someone to upgrade our systems every five years."
All of those answers are perfectly reasonable, but all of them are misinformed. It's our job to let them know that, yes, it may sound expensive at first to upgrade every five years, but putting together a bullet-proof system to last fifteen years is much more expensive. We can also explain how to remain compatible (say, via virtualization, as stated in another post) so they don't have to relearn everything every five years. In fact, the experience remains consistent well into the future. And finally, we can say that, again, the costs incurred with upgrading hardware every five years is much less than designing a system that needs to last at least fifteen years... not to mention, the system still has to be maintained, rigorously, so those costs don't just go away simply because the system has been designed to last a longer period of time.
If, after all of that, they're still set in their ways and aren't willing to take your advice, then I suppose you just have to do what they want... but it would be disingenuous for IT professionals to just do what the user asks on spec, because, as said before, most of the time they don't know or understand what they want. There's a reason why we're the professionals and they're not (i.e., I'm not going to tell an architect that I want a house without a foundation and expect him not to tell me I'm an idiot). Why do people insist on doing that when it comes to IT?
If you love your father... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you will tell him to get a professional to do this for him. Whether he understands it or not, your father's livelihood depends on having computers that are up and running, and from the limited picture you've given us, it sounds like he only thinks about information technology when something is going wrong.
Simply replacing his current hardware with newer gear is just kicking the problem down the road. In the last 15 years, there have been significant advances that he should consider taking advantage of, because they can make his business run more efficiently. But the only way to determine the "right" solution is to have someone who understands your father's business design a solution for him. A good place to start would be with the vendor who sold him his current setup, if they are still in business. They can most likely recommend a suitable hardware platform and assist with data migration to a newer, supported version of their software, and provide some sort of service arrangement that will ensure that these systems are maintained, not just used.
If you're bound and determined to do this yourself, the recommendations about virtualization are good ones - you can build a couple of VM images that you can backup to a USB flash drive nightly, or even better, several flash drives - learn about backup rotation schemes and design one that gives you the ability to recover two weeks worth of image data at least.
Up thread, someone said that if you do this, you will be supporting it for the next 10-15 years. You need to keep that in mind when deciding how to proceed. Best of luck!
Re:Industrial PCs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based (even if it runs off of one machine as a server without the Internet) and forgetaboutit. Keep it as basic and generic as possible and then the hardware will never matter.
keep the existing setup and virtualize it (Score:3, Insightful)
keep the existing setup and virtualize it (vmware is nice, but, xen is free)
upgrade the vm host hardware as needed or as necessary, instead of upgrading a machine that should really be left alone.
benefits:
1) minimal effort needed on your part
2) your dad doesn't need to learn new software as it is exactly the same, and all the data is retained
3) hardware upgrades are transparent to the client vm (hopefully)
(but, don't forget to routinely backup the data on the vm like any other machine though)
Re:forget it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Occasional thorough cleanings of dust off the fans and power supply will greatly extend the life of the entire computer.
Flaky / noisy fans, and especially, buzzing / irregular sounding power supplies are telltale signs of serious dust problems.
Sucking / blowing out dust is sufficient for most of the parts, but sometimes not enough for fans (including those on graphics cards, etc) and power supply where dust can easily cake up necessitating physical disassembly for cleaning.
In short, the OP, if they haven't already, should make regular dust cleanings part of the maintenance routine - that alone will add much life to the hardware.
Ron
Re:forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Two minutes ago I was thinking the exact same thing. Then I realised if a small business owner tells you that 15 years ago he set up a system at minimal cost and is only now looking at changing because the hardware is noticeably ageing, you'd have a hard time explaining to him that it's going to be *harder* to set up a system with similar longevity nowadays.
I wouldn't know how to even approach the subject without sounding like I'm just trying to extract more cash out of him.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you ever thought about that claim? The wear-leveling claim that is? Because in my world that kind of behavior is going to need some sort of index so that the SSD controller knows where it is currently storing block 0 on the flash device. And that index must be non-volatile. So what kind of storage might be used for that? Hmm. Perhaps flash. And how often will that index have to be written to? Any time any other piece of the flash is written. (Even if the controller isn't moving the storage around on the device it still needs to know how often the current cell has been written.) So how many write cycles does that index data have?
Re:forget it (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed.
Anyone that has dealt with users and customers that "know a little" has to help them learn a bit more about reality of hardware. He was lucky that he got 15 years out of it, but that doesn't mean anything, than a pitiful anecdote.
I tell everyone (from experience) that they should plan to replace their business system every 2 to 3 years, and home systems every 5 at most. If they don't plan for that, then they will likely experience a catastrophic failures. Very bad for business, and sad for home users.
This person may discover the hard way that tomorrow, the 15 year old reliable machine will no longer turn on... and can not be rescued. A week later they might have some of the replacement stuff working again, but the pain will be much higher cost than being reasonable in the requests and get a "system" that works long term.
We know 4 things about the person making the request:
1) he has unrealistic expectations for reliability
2) he asking for something that is difficult, if not impossible to guarantee
3) as a dentist, his needs do not match the request (i.e. he is not going on a 15 year isolated excursion to a moon around Jupiter)
We know 2 things about the previous poster
1) prefers to defend the indefensible
2) thinks customers make reasonable requests
I could infer a bunch more.
How to build it? The same way as any other... (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you build a system that a BUSINESS is reliant upon? Easy, the same way you build one for a multimillion dollar company.
Weigh the risks of the "system" going down hard. What impact does it have on the business? If he can be down for a few DAYS, then no big deal. If he can only be down for a few hours, then the hardware obviously needs to be a bit more reliable (at least throw some RAID in there).
Regarding the 10-15 year "wish", throw that out. Sorry, but you probably paid $3000 back in "the day" for that state o' the art 486, and these days, you can afford to replace said hardware 3 or 4 times over for that price. Purchase what is needed based on business impact, and simply plan on replacing every 5 years.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but they're going to be so expensive you'd be better off buying a pair of the cheap old-generation 20gb IDE (or SATA) hard drives.
Put the difference between the cost of your drive and a SSD in the bank (>$200). When one of your mechanical drives eventually fails, take that workstation out of service, and just use the other one to get by when that happens.
Use the money in the bank to acquire a second mechanical drive, or more likely that GOOD SSD, which in 5 years, will be dirt cheap and pretty reliable.
Re:Vet Software (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you're on the right track.
Come on gang, $300 in hardware is peanuts.
The guy "likes what worked" but he needs an exit strategy for his data. I know how tough retraining can be too, but he at least needs the info while his "refreshed system" is being offered so he can be informed. Both I and my coworker "didn't need fancy cell phones" until one random month apiece we "just grew into them", and then became more productive.
DOS software is pretty aged now. I really shudder to think about it ANOTHER 15 years from now. I don't know where the golden point is in Vet software, but it should be looked at to provide the decision context.
Re:forget it (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't, because his original solution probably cost a small fortune. Compare PC prices from 1994 to pc prices today. You can probably buy 3 computers today for what each computer cost in 94. The downside of that is they may not last as long. That said, he's damn lucky if all his pc's have kept going for 15 years. In fact, the only reason he hasn't upgraded before is probably because of luck.
That said, while hardware designed to last 15 years is probably extremely cost-prohibitive, you can design the system to make replacing hardware very easy. Who cares about hardware failures if you can drop in a spare in minutes?
Anyways, if you want a system to last a long time with little management, there are some easy steps to take.
1. Use mature technology.
2. Use passive cooling.
3. Provide automated recovery. There will be failures in any system, make it easy to recover from.
4. Document and schedule regular maintenance, with reminders. For example, once a year blow the dust out of the pc's. Clear old entries out of the database. Run a hard drive/memory diagnostics to spot failures before it becomes a major issue.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to go ahead and throw out the idea that maybe the people who develop these SSDs are smart enough to realize that.
Old hardware is expensive; old software impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
This is dead on. NASA and the DoD pay serious money to be able to run 15-year-old hardware and software--unless you're made of money, you don't want to be doing this.
Best suggestion is to use the most Open Source software and commodity hardware that you can. Your proprietary software vendor may not be around in 14 years, and even if they are, they may no longer offer the software you need to replace/fix/etc.
[Yes, this means you, Microsoft. I designed my enterprise accounting system to run on Bob and I've been hearing about it ever since...]
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say you populate your infrastructure with 1,000 2.4" SSD's with a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. In theory, you can assume that you're going to have one drive fail every 1,000 hours.
Erm, no. For starters, drive failures aren't uniformly distributed between installation and some arbitrary end-of-life cutoff. All you can say in your example is that if you sum up the total life of each of those 1000 SSDs and then divide by 1000, you'll get ~1000000.
What the GP was saying was that the quoted MTBF was patently ridiculous. Most hard drives will die long before they're 10 years old, even in home usage let alone server drives that get pounded 24/7. 80 years is at least an order of magnitude too optimistic.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
>>Keep in mind that it may be prudent to pick less-reliable hardware that should still last 4 or 5 years (most likely), over slightly more-reliable hardware
What is reliable hardware?
I'm sure every nerd on here has his favorite brand of motherboard and hard drive, but by and large, we don't have the slightest idea which DVD drive out nowadays will have a high or low failure rate 5 years from now.
We like to think we know more than we do.
No moving parts - or maybe VMWare (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly. Moving parts break. Heat breaks things. Fans sucking dog hairs into the system will break things. Assuming he's going to be using the same MS DOS app for the next decade or so, he does not need a powerful machine (which is handy). You just want some ultra-low power system (Atom? - how about one of those Asus desktop EEPC thingies - fit a cheap SSD if it doesn't come with one) - ideally just get something with a CPU and a PSU that doesn't need a fan, just a heatsink.
Thirdly it will fail. It's a PC for your Dad, it's critical to his business - therefore whatever you do will screw up. Install a backup solution. I'm assuming it's not creating vast amounts of data, so just something that'll spool the new data up the ADSL/cable/modem to a NAS/PC you can get your hands on somewhere out there.
Finally - you might want to consider VMWare. Performance hit isn't a problem in his case, and wouldn't it be nice if you could restore a complete failure/screwup in minutes (Oh and allow him to run a decent OS alongside the DOS app - as a bonus). Hardware's going to be cheap, so might as well buy a spare system. Anything does wrong - you just zap the image onto the new system and he's up and running whilst you try to work out whether the old PSU shorted, or the memory just came loose. If you feel very techy, could just setup the systems to mirror and implement a hot-standby (although possibly we're moving into the realms of overkill here).
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Is virtualization a possibility?
Why not go to 3 machines, 2 of which run vmware client and one which runs vmware server?
Then the hardware is unimportant.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>I'd say an online UPS as a component to help prevent premature power supply failure.
IMHO ye are over-engineering this whole project. Instead I'd recommend the approach I used six years ago: (1) Buy the best product you can with the latest CPU (i7). (2) Max it out with as much RAM as you can afford so there's room for future software bloat...er, growth. (3) Buy a good product, not an eMachine.
The end. I've had my PC for seven years now and although it's started to feel a little cramped (1 gig/3000 megahertz), it still runs anything I want it to run, and I fully expect it to be working in 2012. It appears this dentist followed the same philosophy when he originally bought his machine in circa 1993.
Re:Moving parts are the main problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Top of the line will generate a lot of heat though. OP doesn't need lots of processing power... an Atom processor would be better.
This would reduce the chances of heat related failures... shell out for good fans and a good PSU. A RAID 1 would be sufficient... you don't sound like you're dealing with a lot of data, it might be better to show him how to use a DVD-R burner and have him manually back up every month or so. If you do go for the RAID, stick to tried and true technology (No bleeding edge 2TB drives. Also sticking to say, a 5400rpm drive will reduce chances of drive failure.)