Servers on eBay.....

ThorpedoUK

ThorpedoUK

ThorpedoUK

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Just wondered if anybody knew where the majority of small businesses on ebay get there regular supply of "old" servers from? You see a lot of DL380's // Dell 2650's etc on there which are really good work horses, I could actually do with a rack of them right now until I can afford something more substantial, any ideas where these guys pick them up?

I'm assuming it is liquidated // recycled corporate stock, just no idea where you would find these auctions.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks v much!
 
Just keep an eye on ebay. Power consumption is a massive factor when it comes to datacenter equipment - so an older machine using more power for less performance is not an efficient use of space and is costing more money to keep in the datacenter.
 
I think that was his point :) He means, where do the ebay sellers buy them from to then sell on to make profit, as some of them are clearly not selling on "their" company's behalf to make back money. i.e. they buy and sell old servers for profit. I would like to know too.
 
Once the kit is EOL or out of it's initial support period it's sometimes cheaper to sell them on and get newer kit than renew the support contract.

There are loads of IT resellers about and they offer a nice way for companies to get rid of old kit, keep to WEEE regulations and make a very small amount of cash back.
 
There a lot of recycled stuff on the bay. I just got my HP 1320n laser from there with a full cart for £70. I asked about page count etc, and they are recycled/reconditioned units. Mine only has 3200 page count (Barely run in!) and an absolute bargain!
As said, stuff which is no longer required, is sold on. They sell / give them to recycling companies who sell them on for a quick profit.
 
WEEE stuff - i know of one company in Bolton who get paid to take WEEE and then sell it on ebay - profit at both ends!

They also buy by the pallet load (sometimes on ebay) etc - so get a good price, split it up, test maybe then sell on at profit.

I did once see a container load of CRT monitors on ebay, i think it must have been wishful thinking on the part of the seller...
 
I just wondered because some of the kit on there (imho) goes for an absolute bargain, for example I recently saw 3 x Dell Poweredge 6850's go with Quad 3.16GHz Xeons (old but 64bit) 4GB RAM (64GB capable machine) and 3x72GB (U320 admittedly but still decent amount of storage), all three were sold separately and the most one went for was about £139, the rest £100 and £110!!!

That is a steal at that price when you can collect, I know its a 4U and drinks power but for me, it would have to go in a DC anyway.

Anyone here picked up any server bargains on there?
 
The whole point of servers like these is they are wanted by businesses to run critical applications - support and peace of mind are the main reason for buying them. Thats why they all have redundant PSUs, RAID etc built in - peace of mind.

Yes you can get a bargain on ebay, but most businesses would rather buy something that they know where it has come from, with a proper on site support contract. So not many businesses want them, most people realise they are a waste of time in your house... so it's a niche market, hence the low prices
 
ThorpedoUK said:
I just wondered because some of the kit on there (imho) goes for an absolute bargain, for example I recently saw 3 x Dell Poweredge 6850's go with Quad 3.16GHz Xeons (old but 64bit) 4GB RAM (64GB capable machine) and 3x72GB (U320 admittedly but still decent amount of storage), all three were sold separately and the most one went for was about £139, the rest £100 and £110!!!

That is a steal at that price when you can collect, I know its a 4U and drinks power but for me, it would have to go in a DC anyway.

Anyone here picked up any server bargains on there?
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Each one of those will use 3A.

A quad core HT Dell R210 will use 0.5A and be twice as powerful. You're going to recoup the increased purchase costs of a Dell R210 in about 2-3 months depending on your particular DC's power pricing.
 
iaind said:
The whole point of servers like these is they are wanted by businesses to run critical applications - support and peace of mind are the main reason for buying them. Thats why they all have redundant PSUs, RAID etc built in - peace of mind.

Yes you can get a bargain on ebay, but most businesses would rather buy something that they know where it has come from, with a proper on site support contract. So not many businesses want them, most people realise they are a waste of time in your house... so it's a niche market, hence the low prices
Click to expand...

This. Support and warrenty is a major thing for most compaines. If drives or any other hardware fails its still in warrently. Any of our hard drives that are old than about 3 years, regardless of warrently, get replaced. No point in losing company data or downtime due to broken hardware just because you didnt upgrade for 5 years. Wouldnt consider buying second hand.

We have SAS drives and backup tapes at the moment but will be going down the root of SAN storage soon. Only problem is that its going to cost a huge stack of money for the SAN (20k at least) Then the price of Citrix essentials for XenServer and we are now also looking at MS Sharepoint. Expensive times...good job its not my money!
 
They can be quite usefull for dev/testing, and also semi-production machines in smaller compainies, things such as deployment servers and other non mission-critical uses.
 
Guest2 said:
This. Support and warrenty is a major thing for most compaines. If drives or any other hardware fails its still in warrently. Any of our hard drives that are old than about 3 years, regardless of warrently, get replaced. No point in losing company data or downtime due to broken hardware just because you didnt upgrade for 5 years. Wouldnt consider buying second hand.

We have SAS drives and backup tapes at the moment but will be going down the root of SAN storage soon. Only problem is that its going to cost a huge stack of money for the SAN (20k at least) Then the price of Citrix essentials for XenServer and we are now also looking at MS Sharepoint. Expensive times...good job its not my money!
Click to expand...

Just out of interest, what price did you get quoted for Citrix essentials (XenServer), I was looking at that too, mainly for the HA functionality (XenMotion is good but not so good if the host fails at 3am, although chances are I'd be playing BFBC2 anyway atm :D, that game is addictive!)

Nothing wrong with SAS drives, they are fine, we are using NetApp SAN's here with hardware mirroring, they work absolutely great with VMware!

I can see your guys point about the power these old servers drink, but as the guy above said, for a virtualisation lab they are a bargain (when you don't have to pay for the juice).
 
We went to have a demo of XenServer and my boss got the sales guy to send him a quote for it. I think it was about 4k. At the moment we just have our SQL database and a secondary DC on Xenserver (not essentials) We have taken a backup of the SQL virtual machine if it goes down and have database backups on our fileserver and on tape every night.

Why are you using VMWare and Xenserver? I thought most busineeses have either or
 
Two different clients mate, one using VMWare ESX (vSphere 4) on 2 x 6850's with quad dual core procs, 32GB RAM each connected to a NetApp SAN which hardware mirrors to its opposite at another site, this was built and deployed in 2005 // 2006 when XenServer was not fully developed (or free).

Second client has 2 x R610's (dual quad cores) with 32GB RAM and XenServer 5.5 connected to a MD3000i in a pooler master scenario, this is running quite a lot of apps at ease at the moment, these new Dell servers are superb - apps it is running are: Win 2008 64 bit all round, XenApp 5 (6 is ok but WIN2K8 R2 is annoyingly bug ridden imho), XenDesktop 4, Active Dir // DNS, Citrix Secure Gateway, SQL Server 2005 etc...

XenServer is configured with multipathing enabled (iSCSI) and XenMotion, all of which is free out of the box - pretty awesome.

You should seriously consider downloading the trial version of XenApp 5 (or 6) and definately XenDesktop (get the express edition, it is free and has 10 licenses) that in particular is extremely cool software to play around with. :D
 
Ive found good use for those kinds of servers to act as redundancy for our main ones also software developers like there own developing space.
 
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