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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)
Used hardware vendor says rack space is free...run your data center on Pentium 3s. News at 11.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...is on an "upgrade" cycle. All equipment with red LEDs needs to be replaced with equipment with blue LEDs, at least on the front face of the equipment.
The CEO toured the data center recently and wanted to see blue LEDs on everything.
One new server crammed with RAM, with a support contract, and with readily available power supplies is preferable by FAR to me and my organization versus 6 old units. Especially considering per-processor licensing fees for Windows and VMWare.
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.
Amen to this, we run ~400 VM's on 14 hosts, using less than 1/3rd the power we did when we ran 160-180 physical boxes and everything is easier to manage, new deployments take minutes instead of weeks. We've saved a few million by not needing to grow our datacenter, probably over a million on Microsoft licensing, and made both my staff and my customers happier. There's no way I'd run things on old physical boxes just to save a few dollars on capital expenses.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.