On 8/23/22 18:24, Ansgar wrote:
I don't know much 10+ years hardware still in productive use...
For ecological reasons, we decided to try (whenever possible) to use servers as long as possible, as much as 15 years. In many cases that's possible. For example, old Dell PowerEdge R610 servers can be equipped with 2x newer CPUs (it's a 2 socket mother board), more RAM, and recent network boards (like Mellanox ConnectX4). All of that costs a fraction of the price of a new server. In many cases, this type of server can handle the workload very well. For example, it's ok for a Ceph MON machine, or a Swift proxy machine (as long as you need only CPU + network load, not storage, this kind of servers are fine).
Either way, such ancient hardware is probably not a good example for the firmware problem: it was a significantly smaller problem back then.
I do not agree that these Dell servers do not need firmware though. When equipped with QLogic, Intel or Broadcom NICs, you *must* install the non-free firmware packages, as I wrote earlier (and the CPU microcode updates too...).
Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)