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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."
just load a clean copy of XP SP3 and OOS - you are good to go.
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
Anyone want my 386DX? $4000 refurb AS IS.
This just in, when you're poorer you make due with what is cheap.
Hey! I can fire-up my Amiga 1000, 2000 and 4000!
Damm, I'm cutting edge again!
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
Does anyone have URLs to resellers with whom you've done business? Being able to compare prices to something other than ebay without having to make a couple dozen phone calls would be extremely helpful.
the thought that 2009 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. Seriously, I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on a 700MHz laptop with 256MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive. It works fine given I know that I can't open up 40 apps at once, and it will be a bit slower than my desktop, but it's great for where I use it.
Speaking of desktops, I have several that are nearly 8 years old and running Ubuntu quite well. In fact the 'end users' in my house don't know the difference between the old systems and the new ones.
I'm thinking that the push for re-utilizing older hardware will have Linux on the Desktop very shortly. It's about time.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
How to make money when times are hard:
1. Buy oodles of cheap hardware
2. Search it for confidential info
3. Blackmail
4. Profit!
For the most part Used hardware is a good deal. Getting new stuff is often more emotional then rational. Oh you need to expand your 100Mbit network. You don't need the giga bit network so why not pay say 50% less for network gear that is a good fit for your infrastructure. A lot of this equipment are real work horses and will run fine for decades. Even PC's a 2 year old High End PC is now a mid range PC today. and if you can get a used MidRange PC at 25% off new then why not.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...Which is why I still have much of my old stuff in use today.
Granted, newer OS'es have gotten much more resource intensive (including Linux), but by and large a lot can still be done on old hardware.
P2's and P3's can still be used as web servers, desktops, and thin clients. Old-school Pentium/Pentium MMX machines are great as simple x terminals. Take an old Compaq Proliant quad Xeon 450 server, throw a copy of linux on it and run a bunch of "classic" Pentium machines as xterminals and there's your new call center's environment for only a few thousand dollars. There's a number of scenarios where investing tens of thousands of dollars in shiny new hardware doesn't make a lot of sense. Does the accounting dept really need PC's with 4GB of ram and two dual core procs? Can't they do their work on Athlons or P4's loaded with a decent amount of RAM? Does the secretary pool really need PC's with enough power to do nuclear simulations on? Didn't our corporate domain controllers used run P3 Xeons?
I still have a Thinkpad 570/333MHz/192MB that sees daily use with Win2000 installed. I have an IBM 300GL p2-333MHz machine that I use as the desktop companion to the laptop, again I get real work done on these machines along with the P3-550 and my primary Athlon XP 2500 machine.
Old hardware didn't stop working, we just stopped using it.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
If this keeps some gear out of the landfills it's a good thing. The computer and electronics industry are filthy industries. We don't need more heavy metals leaching out of the landfills. Or getting dumped in the 3rd world.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
XP won't install on the Cat 7000 I just bought from a firesale. OMG what should I do????
{:-)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I don't see it. While I see the value in old gear personally, I do not see the value in old gear professionally. Part of what IT does is manage disasters. If you are using old gear, you'd better have some OTHER old gear standing by in case the old-gear-in-use fails. With new gear, part of the value is warranty and service. I have somewhere to turn in case of problem. All of my servers are under next-business-day service warranty. All of my workstations and laptops are too. To me, that is where I see value.
By and large board level execs would prefer to spend $5000 on equipment than $2000 on support staff.
Perhaps there is a point to this, after all - it may be easier to place an upper bound on equipment costs whereas support costs for an older set of equipment could be harder to determine.
Also, you enjoy the new equipment and can look forward to it being longer before it needs replacing.
Finally - who stands by you for sox, HIPAA, PCI compliance if the vendors have stopped supporting equipment with bug fixes etc.
As sensible as it seems, old equipment just does not work for many organizations and it has nothing to do with the basic health of the equipment.
Nullius in verba
Like many of the posters here, I've kept around good hardware that works because it works and it's already paid for (please ignore my credit card balances for now...)
My primary archiving box and storage server is a Mirror Drive Door Power Mac G4 tower, which is awesome because it holds 2 DVD drives and 4 hard disks, which is better than most other Apple towers (with the exception of the Mac Pros.) It serves up what I need with OS X 10.5 and whenever I end up needing more storage, I'll throw a SATA card in there to use newer, faster, larger drives.
Sure it's unsupported hardware, but it's solid, it's relatively compact (compared with G5 towers and Mac Pros) and doesn't gobble that much power (survives w/ a ~ 300W power supply.) It gets the job done, and gets no complaints from me or the wife about its performance. Yay for old hardware that works!
It's a lifesaver when money gets tight. I just had a router go for my T1 last week and don't really have the cash to pick up a new one. $75 on Craigslist and I'm running again with a Cisco 2600 /w WIC.
Buy refurb P4 or Athlon64 HP desktop machines from Tiger Direct for $140 bucks. That's the price of the XP Pro license it comes with. Throw in another gig of RAM, load OO and voila, you have a machine that will satisfy 80% of my corporate users for practically nothing. And it is domain-ready.
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.
My place has been testing older servers we've had sitting around for power usage, computation power, throughput...
What fits the curves stays, what doesn't gets nuke-wiped and sold off.
Seriously... MRI machines are fun.
Clears up storage and re-purposes still viable servers, usually with vmware.
So now we have Franken-rack, Bride of Franken-rack (thin cabinet, no side space), and Son of Franken-rack (half-height cabinet).
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.
can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these old machines?
I'd love to find a place to get LCD panels with dead pixels on the cheap - perfect for a server-in-the-closet...
ebay / craigslist / retail "openbox" deals
I worked in a video production/editing shop for a couple years. They replaced 1/3 of their systems every year. Now granted, they're work is time critical. And faster is always better. But the old systems saw reuse in the front office or were demoted to the render farm.
Things that had been there for 5 years were then finally taken off the line with employees and friends getting first dibs. That's how I ended up with a Quad 500Mhz DEC Alpha machine with a whopping 2GB of Ram for $650. Complete with NT4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5.6!
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
A switch would be much better than a hub. Go look up CSMACD.
"Old" 10MB ethernet could have packet collide and you would hit a quick drop off in bandwidth once you had more than a certain percentage of utilization happening.
Switches created isolated segments for each connection, limiting the collision domain so you could talk two different destinations could talk without interfering with each other.
100MB connections and up had send and receive on different lines so it was impossible to really collide.
One good use for an old 10MB hub though, connect it up between your external router and Internet "source" (Cable Modem, DSL Modem, etc), and use it as a "poor man's tap" so you plug your computer into the line and sniff the network traffic (http://www.wireshark.org/). It can be amazing fun to watch the trash that might wash up against your external connection.
Note: Make sure the interface you plug in for monitoring won't take an IP address. You don't need one to monitor traffic, if might confuse the Cable/DSL modem, and it will open up that machine to possible external connections, which are happening without the benefit of your usual router between you and the internet. :)
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Since you asked,
Your mom is so poor, a 386DX *is* worth more then her house.
She is also so dumb, the 386DX has more transistors then she has brain cells.
She is also so fat, you can throw a 386DX at her and it will float around her in orbit.
(ps: booya)