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Recession Pushes IT To Find New Value In Old Gear
buzzardsbay writes "Trying to put a bright spin on a gloomy subject, the folks at eWEEK unearth an emerging trend: There's a booming cottage industry of dealers in refurbished computer and networking gear serving folks on the hunt for 'slightly used' and 'new to you' equipment. The dealers selling the stuff tell eWEEK the equipment is practically new, most of it less than a year old, and that the prices for things like servers and routers are lower than they have been since the post dot-com / Sept. 11 days in 2001. Used gear isn't for everybody, obviously. The story points out that while many of these used IT dealers offer configuration services, they don't do installs, and most are not authorized resellers. They do, however, offer decent warranties, so if you can do some of the work yourself, you'll probably be OK."
I am not affiliated with them in any way but I use anysystem.com. The have Sun, IBM, HP and Cisco hardware (systems and parts). They also offer a 1 year warranty on what they sell.
For network gear I would recommend cxtec.com. My former company did business with them to save money. Failures were few and far between. When a piece of equipment did fail, it was replaced quickly.
The one thing to remember when buying refurbs for enterprise use is to always go n+1 (i.e. have at least one spare on the shelf).
David
For the past decade, I've been a buyer of lightly used servers like IBM 44P, Dell PowerEdge, etc purchasing these mainly as redundant hardware for existing servers.
In the last year, I have solicited quotes for used equivalents and the price gap has narrowed to the point where new is as cheap as used.
My last purchase of PowerEdge 2900's was actually cheaper through Dell (brand new, 3 yr warranty, etc) than a stripped down 2900 from refurbished vendors.
It seems it's followed car parts in that in the 70's and 80's you could save a lot buying from a salvage yard, but now days you save little or none vs buying from new car part dealers.
I get quotes from multiple vendors so it's not just one company inflating prices.
Just wanted to add that, in my experience, the trend is the opposite of what the article is suggesting.
No, switches would perform much better. Sorry, but hubs suck. Consumer grade switches of today blow away hubs. The big problems hubs have is contention. Their total bandwidth is shared among all ports and everything is in one collision domain. So as the number of users goes up, more and more collisions happen and total throughput goes DOWN in fact. This is one reason token ring used to be popular. Despite much higher latency, it scaled better. You could have 100 computers and not have contention problems. Also things slow down if you have something like a server that needs to be talking both direction continuously. Hubs are half duplex so send and receive are mutually exclusive. Thus you get even more collisions and reduced performance if something is trying to do a large amount of sending and receiving at the same time.
Switches don't have that problem, of course. They break up the collision domain. You can get full bandwidth to every port in both directions, provided the backplane can handle it (and they can these days). You don't run in to scaling issues until you are actually saturating a link, and bandwidth doesn't go down as numbers go up.
Now I'm not saying that hubs can't work, that they can't get traffic from point a to point b but don't confuse yourself in to thinking that the hubs will perform better than a switch. They won't.
I've been an Anysystem customer both personally and professionally.
I was happy with my experiences. They even gave me a yellow rubber ducky with one of my orders.