Recession Pushes IT To Find New Value In Old Gear 206
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."
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:4, Informative)
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
Not my observation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Oh, I don't know.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.redrabbitt.com
This is the refurbishing arm of the same company that owns MicroCenter. They have depots in Columbus, OH and Reno, NV.
I picked up a couple of Dell Optiplex 280's. Each had 1GB ram, 3GHz Pentium HT, cost was less than $90 incl shipping and had a 60 day warranty (for non-commercial customers). Added a 320GB hd for $45 and used XP Pro install media (used license keys on the machines) for cheap Windows machines. They spec these in bulk, so you get surprises like video cards with dual-DVI output and TV capture cards every once in a while.
Warranty returns were relatively quick and painless. One of the Dells had an overheating problem and it was no trouble to drop the unit off at the depot and get a refund for it. I don't know if they cover return shipping if you are non-local, however.
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:4, Informative)
I was happy with my experiences. They even gave me a yellow rubber ducky with one of my orders.
Re:New value in old gear? (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, brand new equipment is much more likely to fail than middle-aged equipment at the bottom of the bathtub curve.
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:3, Informative)
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Seriously, that is sad to hear. I will think twice if the occasion to use them again presents itself.
Re:links to reliable resellers? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget the low end stuff too! Sometimes there is a lot of money a company can save. Example: At the company I work for the PC's in the shop can go through 4 mice/keyboards in the lifetime of a desktop because of poor treatment. I get a mailer (Once Monthly at the most) from a company called gearxs.com At one point we purchased 20 Logitech mice from them for $1.29 each. We have been upgrading everyone to 22" flatscreens and a year ago, when they were still always $230+ we got a handful for $140 each. Their normal prices are not that great but when they send out their sales flier you can pick up some of the every day tech that every company needs are real nice prices.
I also used ServerSupply.com to get spare parts for HP DL380 Servers to keep them running. Once I ordered 4 147 GB Hot swap SCSI drives and realized I read the part number wrong and ended up with 68 Pin instead of 80. They took the parts back with no restocking fee to us (Even though I had opened two of the boxes)...we just had to pay the shipping. It is not common for a company to eat YOUR mistake.
Just two places that I found gave me some good deals and fast service. Ordered many times from both places and felt like I was walking away with a deal every time.