Rebooting servers

Ask your average system administrator, or even a non-technical but interested third party, and they will tell you the importance of long uptimes on servers and how they want to see those ultra-high time since reboots on them. It feels natural, and nearly everyone brags about it. My servers have not needed a reboot in three years!

There are two key problems with this, however.

The first problem is that time since reboot carries no business value, and business value determines IT value. So why should we care, let alone brag, about something that has no value? It might be interesting to know how long a system has managed to stay online, but an investor is not going to reap a reward from the fact that a computer system has gone an extended period of time without a reboot. We work for the good of the business, if we start to care about something other than resultant business value, we have lost our way. This happens when we focus on means instead of ends, server...