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Buying New Commercial IT Hardware Isn't Always Worthwhile (Video)
Ben Blair is CTO of MarkITx, a company that brokers used commercial IT gear. This gives him an excellent overview of the marketplace -- not just what companies are willing to buy used, but also what they want to sell as they buy new (or newer) equipment. Ben's main talking point in this interview is that hardware has become so commoditized that in a world where most enterprise software can be virtualized to run across multiple servers, it no longer matters if you have the latest hardware technology; that two older servers can often do the job of one new one -- and for less money, too. So, he says, you should make sure you buy new hardware only when necessary, not just because of the "Ooh... shiny!" factor" (Alternate Video Link)
Electrical energy is also free, apparently.
-- Cheers!
Guy who sells used computer hardware claims that buying new computer hardware is a bad idea, and that you should buy used gear instead. News at 11.
Not what this guy is saying is wrong, but there are other unaddressed issues. They cover issues like "power savings", but not the much more important issue of buying an unknown piece of hardware from an unknown vendor, without a warranty. Aside from that, sometimes there are issues of physical constraints-- like I have limited space, limited ventilation, and one UPS to supply power. Do I want to buy 5 servers, or one powerful one?
Also, it's not true that hardware isn't advancing. In the past few years, USB has gotten much faster, virtualization support has improved, drives and drive interface has gotten faster, etc.
And sometimes, buying "new" is more about getting a known quantity with support, rather than wagering on a crap-shoot.
For some tasks I can understand recycling. I use older hardware to build routers, anti-spam gateways, VPN appliances and the like. Normally these are fairly low-cycle tasks, at least for smaller offices. But I've learned my lesson about using older hardware in mission critical applications. I've set up custom routers that worked just great, until the motherboards popped a cap, and then they're down, and unless you've got spares sitting around, you're in for some misery.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Posting AC as my opinion is mine alone:
Server rooms don't magically expand either. That is why the HP Moonshot, which isn't perfect, is getting a lot of attention. It is far cheaper to buy a dense rack unit than to buy another building, add some kilo-amps of 208-240 VAC UPS and PDUs, as well as the CRACs they require to move the heat out of the building.
On a microcosm, yes, one can run an old single core P3 at home... but why? A newer machine is far more power and heat efficient, and likely runs an OS that is far more recent (thus more secure against modern threats) in general.
Older computers are not old cars. You don't get an achievement for a WoW action by using a Core Duo. Move the data to a VM, donate or properly recycle the machine, and move on.
Not everyone can buy used hardware, but for those who can, doing so is a huge money saver ($75K worth of hardware six years ago is now selling for thousands). Case and point, we bought a fully stocked 16-blade system for about $4K with Quad-Core Xeons and 4GB of RAM. People might say that is crap, but not when what you're replacing is already crap of the crap and upgrades are cheap as well. When factoring in clustering, etc, running on used equipment is hardly risky. Support-wise, this stuff usually has software available that is rock-solid because it's been around for a while. So yes, you wouldn't want to run mission-critical apps on it, but you can get a way with running a ton of auxiliary infrastructure. Never mind making for great test systems.