Have you struggled with rising hardware costs lately? You’re not alone. Between chip shortages, tariff uncertainty, and the Broadcom-VMware licensing shake-up, IT teams are rethinking everything they thought they knew about hardware lifecycle management.
On April 1, 2026, StorMagic hosted a roundtable discussion titled “The Modern Refresh: How to Make Your Hardware Lifecycle Live Longer.” Industry experts gathered to tackle one of today’s most pressing challenges in our market; how to extend server lifespan when traditional three to five-year refresh cycles no longer make financial sense.
The conversation revealed practical strategies that organizations are using right now to navigate dramatically higher costs, hardware delays, and supply chain uncertainty.
Here’s what you need to know from the discussion!
The New Reality of Hardware Lifecycle Management
“This is more like a hardware reset on the pricing, not a price increase…It’s almost like it’s a whole new world right now with what the price actually is, and it’s going to be here for a while.”
Jared Magillish, CTO of Barry Solutions Group
The numbers tell the story. Organizations that once planned standard three to five-year refresh cycles now face quote validity windows of just seven days instead of 30. Hardware vendors are reserving the right to change pricing up until shipment, and memory and drive costs continue climbing with no end in sight.
The StorMagic hardware lifecycle discussion revealed that businesses currently face:
- Delayed infrastructure projects due to 6-to-12 month delivery delays
- Budget overspend from unpredictable pricing
- Increased security and performance risk from aging equipment
- Heightened pressure on IT to do more with less
This isn’t a temporary blip. It’s the new normal for hardware lifecycle management.
Why Traditional Refresh Cycles No Longer Work
The old playbook was simple. It was to buy new servers every three to five years, overprovision for future growth, and budget accordingly. That approach is breaking down.
“Customers typically used to go in and just do a full refresh cycle… We would typically overprovision, give extra resources for growth and things like that. Now we’re seeing customers where we’re literally going in and re-evaluating what’s the business impact of this, because the prices are just so high right now.”
Jared Magillish, CTO of Barry Solutions Group
The challenge isn’t just budget. It’s uncertainty. When you can’t predict what hardware will cost next month, long-term planning becomes impossible.
“Not a day goes by now where we don’t have a conversation with a customer or an email doesn’t come in from an OEM laying out a whole new set of ground rules around pricing. They’re saying we reserve the right to change pricing at this point up until the day stuff ships. How do our customers really budget for that? Well, you can’t. It’s impossible.”
Carrick Buss, Solutions Architect at United Data Technologies
Ways to Improve Your Hardware Lifecycle Management Strategy
Smart organizations are taking a different approach. Instead of wholesale replacement, they’re looking at strategies that extend hardware lifespan while maintaining reliability.
1. Mix and Match Hardware Configurations
One breakthrough approach challenges the traditional requirement for identical hardware across clusters.
“One of the great things about StorMagic is you don’t have to have like hardware… We initially brought in some servers for this customer, and then now because of the price of adding another server to that cluster, we’re considering different options and maybe we look at refurbished gear.”
Jared Magillish, CTO of Barry Solutions Group
The ability to combine servers in the same cluster creates flexibility that traditional solutions can’t match. Your hardware lifecycle management strategy doesn’t need to be all-or-nothing anymore. Here’s an example of that working practice.
“We have a retirement healthcare facility that we work with. They have some older hardware, a Gen 9 server and a Gen 10 server. With our SvSAN product and Hyper-V, we created a high availability cluster with a Gen 9 and a Gen 10 on their primary site, and then we use another Gen 9 server on a remote location and enable replication between those.”
Stuart Campbell, Pre-Sales Support Manager at StorMagic
2. Refurbished Hardware as Strategic Choice
The stigma around refurbished equipment is fading as costs rise. Servers are lasting longer than ever. Our panelists noted that companies are easily running six to seven years on a server when properly maintained and right-sized for workloads.
“Distribution usually stocks a lot of these servers off the shelf. You can get a preconfigured server that may get you really close to what you need without going down the custom build route. Those things are ready to ship and they’re insulated against some of this chip pricing because distribution has already purchased them.”
Carrick Buss, Solutions Architect at United Data Technologies
3. Right-sizing Instead of Overprovisioning
Most environments are significantly overprovisioned, creating an opportunity to extend hardware lifecycle by repurposing underutilized resources.
“Almost every customer that I see, when I really look at the workloads, I see that they’re quite a bit overprovisioned… RAM utilization is 15-20%, CPU is down 15-20%. I mean, it’s just really not doing much at all.”
Carrick Buss, Solutions Architect at United Data Technologies
The opportunity? In practice, you could theoretically take a couple of hosts out of your current cluster configuration and kind of move those to the side and put StorMagic on there. You would still have plenty of capacity at your data center, but you can recycle some of that hardware for an edge use case. More solutions like this can be heard in the full on-demand webinar.
The Edge Location Challenge
Edge deployments face unique hardware lifecycle management challenges. These locations lack the support infrastructure of enterprise data centers, yet they need the same reliability.
“Edge locations don’t have the ecosystems like a big enterprise data center has… They’re more or less on their own and they run things totally different than an enterprise data center.”
Wesley Ganeko, Director of Americas Sales at StorMagic
“We’re seeing a lot more customers now that have come and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking to upgrade our servers, upgrade memory or something like that.’ And the hardware vendors are saying, ‘No, we’re not just going to sell you memory. If you want to buy a server, we can sell you a server, but we’re not going to sell you individual components now because they need them for their servers.”
Stuart Campbell, Pre-Sales Support Manager at StorMagic
When hardware vendors won’t sell individual components, edge locations can’t simply upgrade. They need solutions that extend the life of existing equipment while maintaining high availability.
What Solutions Actually Work?
Here’s where the conversation gets really interesting. Our panelists didn’t just identify problems. They shared specific, actionable strategies that organizations are implementing right now to extend hardware lifecycle by years, not months.
We discuss exactly how to eliminate unnecessary infrastructure costs, the exact process for migrating workloads without disruption, and surprising ways to repurpose existing hardware that most IT teams haven’t considered.
“A lot of customers are coming to us asking for help in certain areas of their business. The companies that are solution providers, are the problem solvers, and we love this challenge. We can help you preserve maybe what you have a little bit longer, because timing is everything. It could mean a bigger budget or a lesser budget. It could mean a rollout sooner rather than later.”
Wesley Ganeko, Director of Americas Sales at StorMagic
The full roundtable discussion goes deep into the practical solutions that are working right now for organizations just like yours. Watch the complete on-demand recorded roundtable to get the full picture of how to make your hardware lifecycle live longer without increasing operational risk. With our support, your infrastructure refresh doesn’t have to break the budget.
