Your server needs one of two things.We already know which one.

We know, and Brian will tell you on the call along with the reason. For a good number of our clients this is the upgrade, which means keeping the machine and not buying hardware.

Most of the clients on this list are the upgrade, not an invoice for hardware. If we were fishing we would have sent this to everyone rather than the handful whose equipment flagged. And every reason above was published by someone other than us: your software vendor, Microsoft, and a study you can look up in a minute.

It can. Most of our clients are law firms, dental and medical practices, and accounting and financial advisory firms, so this comes up often. Running software the manufacturer no longer patches is the kind of detail that gets examined after an incident rather than before one. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has settled at least one case with a small provider where unsupported software was named in the announcement itself.

We are not going to tell you it makes you non-compliant, because that depends on your circumstances and your counsel. We will tell you it is easier to explain a supported system than an unsupported one.

It means less than it feels like it means. Google published a study of over 100,000 of its own drives and found that more than half of the ones that failed gave no warning from the built-in health monitoring beforehand. Carnegie Mellon, studying about 100,000 drives in production, found replacement rates of 2 to 4 percent a year against a manufacturer spec of 0.88 percent, climbing with age.

We act on every alert we get. We are just not willing to tell you silence is the same thing as health.

Often no, and we would rather you heard that now than in December. Extended security updates for Windows Server 2016 require an active Software Assurance agreement, and the alternative route that existed for Server 2012 R2 was not carried over. We will check your licensing and tell you plainly which side of that you are on.

It depends entirely on which path you are on and what the machine has to carry, so any number we put on a web page would be useless to you. Brian will give you a real one on the call, and if it does not work he will build it a different way. Refurbished, a smaller build, or split across two budget years are all normal answers. Nothing is ordered until you approve it.

Less than people expect, because it is planned rather than endured. Upgrades and migrations both happen after hours or over a weekend. Compare that with a failure, which happens whenever it happens and lasts as long as the replacement takes to arrive.

Probably not, and you should be wary of anyone who tells you otherwise. Measurements from the Uptime Institute and researchers at TU Dresden show that at the light loads a small office server actually runs, a newer machine can draw as much power or more. We are not going to build a case out of a saving you will not see.

Brian Butterfield, our co-founder and chief security officer. He makes these calls himself.