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When it comes to the march of technology, time is the fiercest of foes. Five years ago, few organizations were thinking about AI when invested in servers. Electricity costs were anything from 30% to 80% lower, depending on your location. And while cyberattacks were a serious consideration, they weren’t the constant headache of today.
The problem is that it’s so easy to put off major upgrades – especially with distractions such as Windows 10 going end of life – that servers and data centers can be left to last. “They still work, they’re doing the job,” you tell yourself. But watch out: there is a very good chance that at least parts of your estate are no longer fit for purpose.
In this article, we highlight four danger signs that should warn you of problems. Even if you firmly believe you’re fine, we suggest you read them through. Hopefully you’ll feel just as confident by the end.
Ignore the “hype” about AI. For enterprises, what matters is the reality of AI right now. And one reality is that executives in most organizations – particularly in the US – are now using GenAI to give them an advantage.
Or consider that an ISG survey found that AI use cases in the enterprise had doubled in the space of a year. Doubled!
So to the inevitable question: is your data center AI-ready?
One simple way to find out is listen to your users: are they complaining about a lack of local resources to use, or perhaps you’re seeing a rising use of third-party services? Services, incidentally, that may not be suitable if commercial data is being used for training models.
The good news is that the solution may not be as challenging as you imagine. You should be able to consolidate several five-year-old servers into a single modern one, which not only cuts costs but also real estate demands. And this consolidation scales, so the higher the number of servers you can replace the greater the rewards.
“If you are consolidating five-year-old hardware from our competition, then you are able to basically reduce the space requirements by close to 80%,” claimed AMD’s Benjamin Fintzel in a recent webinar.
“Also the power requirement is dropping by close to 75%,” he added. “But on the other side, if you have less requirements for hardware, your IT staff basically gets time back because the total cost of ownership is going to decrease by around 50%, sometimes even more.”
That frees up space, power and budget for an “AI factory”. That is, a single, tailored solution consisting of hardware and software that can become a trusted environment for your AI workloads.
Dell PowerStore delivers enterprise storage that drives real business value through advanced data reduction technology. The solution offers up to 54% lower energy consumption than competitors, enabling you to meet budget and sustainability goals simultaneously.
The obvious metaphor here is the boiling frog. It sits in a pan of water that gently warms up over time, never noticing that it’s slowly boiling to death.
While no frogs would ever do this in reality, there is truth when it comes to security alerts. We start with a handful that slowly grows into a steady flow… that eventually becomes part of the IT team’s daily workload.
All of this adds to your TCO, but it’s so quiet, so silent, that you don’t notice it.
The flip side of this is that if you invest in the latest servers with security built in – and that adhere to the latest NIST guidelines – then that burden disappears. Which is handy, as you need that budget to invest in the AI tools that could actually drive your organization forward.
One final consideration here: the best modern servers include a level of built-in security that goes far beyond what was available five years ago.
The core technology is called the “silicon root of trust”. Every new Dell server, for example, includes an immutable chip on the system board that holds the public keys necessary to boot – it will only do so if it can verify that the server is running Dell-validated code based on that certificate.
Do you have a single pane-of-glass view for your entire estate? If you confidently answer yes, then congratulations – although we would warn you that your confidence may be misplaced. Over time, the creep of extra hardware and software to satisfy user needs or firefight problems can create complications that you won’t notice until they fail – or are compromised.
Also watch out for a hodgepodge of network tools. In today’s world, with attacks coming from all sides, the best approach is a single dashboard that provides all the information at a glance. And that can be tailored to different job responsibilities, so that everyone has clear visibility over their domain.
This is one of those less visible benefits that comes from a thorough modernization of your data center.
While everyone moans about the rising cost of living, the cost of running data centers has rocketed in the past five years. Assuming you haven’t modernised, and are still running older hardware, you will almost certainly have been hit with the double whammy of rising electricity costs and increased licensing costs.
This, again, is where updating your hardware can have an immediate impact. We have already covered the benefits of consolidation for energy costs, but after VMware switched to its new licensing model in April 2025 – one that moved from a 16-core minimum to a 72-core minimum – many organizations were hit hard. Especially if they were running dozens of servers with relatively few cores.
The obvious answer is to switch to servers with a higher number of cores so you can reap a trio of benefits: lower energy bills, lower licensing costs and reclaiming physical space in your data center.
