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It generally doesn't make much sense to swap out known-good equipment, with possibly flawed equipment.
You use hard drives for example. The failure curve on those goes like a bathtub - relatively lots of failures the first 6 months, much less for the next 4-6 years (depending on whose stats you choose to use), then starts going back up slowly peaking at around 9 years.
If you're in the 3-4 year range, why take the chance? Same thing goes for power supplies.
CPU fans? What servers actually use CPU fans? Any decent server should be utilizing chassis fans blowing over passive cooling, for the exact reasons you cite. Modern servers make monitoring these fans rather trivial (and have all sorts of external indicators that you could hire a security guard to walk through the datacenter marking down machines w/ the blinky red light on if you cannot/will not automate it).
Your datacenter/host should already be doing things like cleaning air filters/etc. periodically.
Now.. retiring old hardware preemptively DOES make sense! But for differing reasons.
1. You start to see a pattern of a certain model line w/ increasing failure rates. Probably time to start migrating folks off of it. Semi-rare, but does happen.
2. You no longer can affordably, reliably, or otherwise stock a proper spare parts inventory for a given server type. Usually this is a financial reason, as it's much cheaper to have 3-4 models to stock parts for, than 3 dozen. Your host is stocking cold spares identical to your system right?
3. For a managed host - support reasons. Older hardware doesn't support newer management techniques (IPMI, onboard gige, old RAID adapters, whatever) and thus is much harder to standardize a management platform across. Probably makes sense to expire older stuff at an accelerated rate as it will save you money in software development or admin time. This can be counter-acted some with careful hardware selection at the time of purchase.
Now, these life cycles are measured in multiple years. 4 years in my experience seems to be about the longest you can expect to keep a given machine in revenue production. Some go a bit longer (rare), and some get pulled earlier for a variety of reasons. Also, you would be surprised about how many customers simply are not interested in a "free upgrade" to newer hardware - their current stuff is working just fine, why tempt fate?
Hope the info helps!
-Phil
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