The Blog of Ben Rockwood – My Server Room Is On Fire:
"The horrible truth, we tend to avoid things untill they are unavoidable. In many cases our threshold for putting up with something broken is so high that we go well beyond what any reasonable person would consider unavoidable, we simply close our eyes and hope it doesn't blow up. Why? Cost of course. No one wants to have less than they need, indeed they want much more than they need. [...] My servers aren't exploding (yet) and thus finance doesn't consider it a real problem."
Someone tell me that's the case everywhere, please… 'cos I know it is where I work. Replacing a 3 years out of warranty server isn't justifiable expenditure – never mind that it's mission critical for a number of customers, and has no DR. I'm almost tempted to set it on fire myself, just so we can get it replaced…