Why Buying Future Proof Technology Is A Sure Way of Losing Money

The decommissioning was required because the hosting company had overspent and gone out of business as a result. The customer it was designed for had required that the specification be future proof not just for a couple of years but for ten.

The waste was horrifying. Rack upon rack of slots sat empty in every single chassis and the cabinets were twice the height they needed to be. 

The crippling cost of the over-specified hardware and the ongoing costs of wasted electricity – larger cabinets need larger power supplies and more cooling – must have been contributors to the hosting company's cash-flow problems. They could even have been the issues that brought it down.

Future proofing sounds good. And I'm the first to agree that, over the short term – a year or two – it is a vitally important issue in most network designs. Trying to cater for a future more than a couple of years away, though, is almost guaranteed to fail, because it's virtually certain that the network will have been replaced before the expansion space has been used.

Coming back to the secret bunker switch and server farm, specifying for ten years ahead seems, on the face of it, to be prudent – especially with a large, mission-critical network. Let's give it a moment's cold, hard thought, though. 

Ten years ago, we were all using Windows 98. The original iPod was still more than two years away. Digital cameras were an exciting new thing. And the average desktop PC was less powerful than today's iPhones.