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."
links to reliable resellers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Refurbish um... "Experienced" Hardware. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Old stuff never stopped working (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, when I have the cash (that's going to plenty of other places) I buy Cisco stuff at auction. I generally go for the bigger equipment. I get some broken stuff and give it to a recycler. The good stuff I test, use for a little while to be sure it's good, then sell at a decent markup. I put a decent markup on it, so I always turn a profit, but it's still a whole lot cheaper for the customer than buying it new elsewhere.
I'm not the biggest place doing it, but I can keep my prices low, because I'm working out of the house in my spare time.
For someone with a decent size office (say 100 desks), a Catalyst 5500 for less than $1k customized for them will do them a lot better than a stack of consumer grade hubs and switches.
I focus on Cisco gear, because I know it really well. I tried to touch the server market, but there is so little profit margin it usually ends up costing me money to sell it.
The last "big" purchase I did, I bought 1 Cisco Catalyst 5000 (5 slot) 1 Cisco Catalyst 5505 (5 slot), 1 Cisco Catalyst 5500 (13 slot), and 3 servers. By the time I got rid of the 5500, 5505, and 1 server, I had already turned a profit. I sold the other 5000 and 1 other server, and that was just more profit.
For me, my problem is that I lost my good high pay job about 2 years ago. It took some time to change my cost of living (get rid of the house, one car, etc), so right now I'm in recovery mode and can't buy anything else to move, even though it would always be at a profit.
Some things are just fun. I bought an oscilloscope for something I was working on. It was cheap because the guy selling didn't even know if it worked. I tested it, bought a couple cheap probes, and then sat on it for a year. I finally decided I wouldn't need it again for a while, so I sold it for double what I had invested. It was a Tektronix, built in the 60's, but it still sold as soon as I made it available.
Re:Refurbish um... "Experienced" Hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're exactly right about the networking gear.
One place I worked for, they had consumer grade "switches" in 4 suites, with a mismatch of technology connecting the suites (all in the same complex). I spent $300 on 6 Cisco Catalyst 2924's with 4 port 100baseFX fiber cards. I spent another $150 on enough fiber to interconnect them all.
I did the upgrades very carefully so as to not break anything during working hours. One suite per day to change them from their cheap switch to the 2924. I spent 3 days on ladders running fiber between the suites. On the last night, I switched their cross connects from the old ways to the fiber. That next morning, people were amazed how fast everything was working.
The VoIP guy was laughing the whole time. I put an office of about 30 desks on "enterprise" equipment. Well, it's old, but when it was new, sure it was "enterprise" equipment. For $450, I couldn't have done anything better. :)
It's not the hardware costs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
New value? How about longevity extending value? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Refurbish um... "Experienced" Hardware. (Score:4, Interesting)
depends on where the gear came from
I've learned from experience that you don't want used computer gear that's been exposed to heavy cigarette smoke for several years.
Craigslist (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you run into trouble with customers who find out that they can't get support from Cisco for their secondhand gear? Or worse, threats from Cisco for running unlicensed OS/firmware?
Cisco makes great hardware in most cases, but I stay away from it like the plague myself because of those and other similar support/licensing policies.
recycling fun... (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:and to think, some people made fun of... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I like Ubuntu quite a bit, and it presents a good UI to the 'end users' in my house, but I am also using Ubuntu Server edition, CentOS 5.x, RHEL 5x, OpenSolaris, DSL, Puppy, and every now and then attempt OpenBSD/NetBSD on some older MVME hardware I have out in the garage. -- yes, this means I am a junk computer hardware collector :) I like Linux
Just for teh h4x0r cred, I'm trying to stick a small mobo in an old external tape drive unit, cd drive where the tape used to be, laptop hd RAID-1 behind it, and all the normal connectors out the back... but that's just a hobby thing. Linux makes it possible for me to do that. $350+ dollars for a copy of windows for such an adventure would be insanity^2 when I'm putting out all of ... oh... fifty cents for the hardware.
Next project is MythTV or similar in an old VCR case. You guessed it, CD where the old tape drive was etc. 160GB laptop HDs are cheap and plentiful, makes the whole thing easy because of reduced power requirements.
After that, old laptop conversion for under the cabinet waterproof pc in the kitchen for recipes and such. One of the end users here likes to look up recipes online. But that will involve hunting for some hardware to allow the laptop screen and keyboard parts to fold and slide under the cabinet for out of the way storage... but Linux makes such a hobby possible... or at least legally possible.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:and to think, some people made fun of... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm started in the 8-bit era and extending the hard- and software was a normal thing. After the demise of all the great platforms (Amiga, Atari) it was hard to "play" with your computer. Windows isn't open enough, and the hardware was boring also.
Now, once again, it is easy to use a computer for anything you can imagine.
I'm still looking for a cheap, low-power single-board computer for some projects. The Linksys NSLU is a bit low on memory and the Soekris board are a bit too expensive for me. One day...
Re:It's about time (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:and to think, some people made fun of... (Score:3, Interesting)
You might like to see what I've been keeping an eye on then:
This site has kind of a turn-key feel to it for my hobby needs:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/store/motherboards/EPIA_5000 [damnsmalllinux.org]
Here is some other mini board news etc.
http://www.mini-itx.com/ [mini-itx.com]
and of course, newegg is your friend:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342 [newegg.com]
I'm experimenting with the various junk cases I've got in order to do something that is retro, not steampunk, and qualifies as a useful hack. Seeing an old VCR in the entertainment cabinet is cool, better if it is a mythtv system with wireless keyboard/mouse. Small odd looking cases is just some how more aesthetic than standard white box cases that 'look' like computers. I bought a computer credenza recently (used for $20) that needed a leg repaired. I'm thinking about embedding the mobo etc. in the underside of the desk. That won't require small parts etc. just some plexiglass to keep fingers and cats out of the electronics.
Re:Oh, I don't know.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [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. :)
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Interesting)
Hah. No. Cisco and Juniper are both out of touch with reality.
The new Cisco 2851 hanging on the wall with a DS3 run into it is actually slower than the PIX 520 (decades old now) in the rack next to it. Granted, by Cisco's own documentation, it's not rated for a full DS3, but even at a fraction of the speed, it cannot handle the NAT, IPSec, and routing the pix has been doing for years. 2851 is at 70%+ util while the pix peaks at 1%. And the 2851 has hardware crypto support, so don't think the less-than-T1-rate VPN traffic is the cause. If you want an expensive device to copy packets from one interface to another (until the end of time), Cisco's got you covered.