On 11/08/08 23:25, Mark Allums wrote:
[snip]
But, would you want a render farm made up of SGI workstations from the
1990s? The state of the art is still moving pretty fast. Even for
mainframes, the shelf-life of what is generally considered useful for a
lot of applications is less than 6 years.
Unless:
(a) your workload growth is relatively static, or
(b) you purchased excess capacity and are growing into it.
An important reason, though, why many mainframe shops upgrade is that
the cost of maintenance contracts skyrocket after 4ish years, so that
it's cheaper to buy a new machine than to maintain the old one.