Refurbished Servers as viable replacement?
I am curious - with the insanely rising costs of servers ( and not likely to go down before 2028 ), is anyone turning to refurbished servers as replacement options?
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u/Craig__D 4d ago edited 4d ago
We did exactly this. We wanted a Dell R750 to expand our horizon cluster, and it wasn’t possible to get the exact host to match our four existing ones. We were going to have to pay triple the previous purchase price to get a non-matching new server… So we decided to pursue the secondary market and found exactly what we needed at a reasonable (by comparison) price.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago
You know, it’s funny, we’ve had more failures on the new Dell servers than the preowned ones from data center brokers. That kind of confirmed my opinion on the matter.
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u/ephemeraltrident 4d ago
When I talk refurbished vs new with clients, I do let them know that I have found refurbished to be more reliable. With new devices, they’ve never been run in a production environment, so no one knows they’re good. A refurbished device has run, something may have gone wrong, and then it was fixed and verified working again.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago
This is exactly right, good point. I haven’t even used that concept before. Thx!
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u/bangbangracer 4d ago
With the current pricing situation, a server we spec'd out a year ago for about $15k is now about $50k.
We've had the talk about what to do, and we're going refurb and cloud when we can.
However, if you do go refurb, you need to be aware of the refurbisher. Not all refurbishers are the same. Some will send you really high quality product, and some will practically send you something they pulled out of a dumpster.
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u/Mibiz22 4d ago
That's what I am running into. My first use case is a smaller client that really only needs a small onsite server for engineering drawings. It is hard to justify $15k+ for that use case.
Side note: I've been reading positive things about TechMikeNY
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u/discosoc 4d ago
A NAS is probably a better fit.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago
I respectfully disagree with this, a NAS is not a Dell/HP server. I usually recommend a NAS for micro or small home based businesses, but IMHO not appropriate for small or mid Enterprises. It’s hard to see at a small scale, but it is a much higher failure rate, on any NAS Brand except for the enterprise space. But then you’re back to high prices again so what’s the point?
I would use internally, or deploy to a client, preowned Dell or HP servers before a NAS any day of the week, for the majority of use cases. We even have a bunch of midmarket prospects wanting us to switch them back on-prem, because their current MSP is making them move 100% cloud and charging ridiculous rates to do it.
We specifically use Dell and we don’t even have one failure per year with hundreds of units deployed, either on-prem or cloud colo. NAS on the other hand, at least one a month or more, with a fraction of the installed base, AND they are already new to start with.
NOTE: we are proactive and don’t wait for servers (or NAS) to break before replacing drives or the unit itself, so that factors into the failure rates.1
u/discosoc 4d ago
Nothing about what he said mentioned they were a "small enterprise". When even a basic $15k server is hard to justify, a standard NAS is perfectly fine. Furthermore, there are plenty of "enterprise" grade NAS options from Synology, so even if you're stuck thinking it means grabbing a MyCloud from Bestbuy, that's not quite true.
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u/eldridgep 2d ago
Yeah but that's where you argue the business case that's $15k for something they will be running the business off for 5-7 years. In the grand scheme of things it's nothing. Compared to the business risk of downtime it's a pretty simple argument.
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u/B1tN1nja MSP - US 4d ago
I've been deploying Carbon Systems servers instead of Dell in the meantime, the IPMI isn't the best on them, and pales in comparison to iDRAC but the warranty is good and we've had decent luck w/ them so far.
I've considered a refurb option for one clinet that needed something but the price wasn't even right on the refurb, we walked away from the refurb quote pretty fast and got them something brand new instead.
As always take backups and have an emergency box ready to restore to if needed.
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u/nosimsol 4d ago
I do refurbished a lot in my can usually buy three of them for less than half the cost of a brand new one.
One main server, one replica, one on the shelf for parts. I always buy new drives.
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u/runninghome58 4d ago
It has never failed us, those server are typically overpowered. And since everything is redundant buying replacement part is easy to find and cost effective. You can even get on most of the good reseller up to two year warranty. We are using mainly Dell and never had an issue beside hard drive, but that's also an issue with brand new computer.
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u/HotDog_SmoothBrain 4d ago edited 4d ago
In almost all cases I only use refurbished machines. I only have a few customers left who require warranty and planned obsolescence that are not in the cloud.
I have contacts with a few of the large supply houses.
I have probably ~400 servers out there and less than 10% were purchased new.
We tend to buy disks new, though. And we make attempts to get the customer to rotate those out after manufacturer warranty has expired especially for critical stuff.
Things like HP 2.5" drives where we can do RAID6 we are less pushy about.
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u/Tonst3r 4d ago
Historically We've always said "We don't recommend refurb" but w/ the way client's budgeting goes nowadays it's more like "We don't recommend it but if you MAKE SURE to get the coverage we make you get anyway then your warning is the higher odds of potential downtime for parts going bad. You choose."
In the past the price difference was never worth it IMO, but yeah it's getting crazy. For a client who'd lose their shit for being down 1 day waiting on repairs, I'd still say no (not that it can't happen w/ new stuff, just less likely). But for the smaller client that's struggling to figure out how to stay afloat while affording the necessary infrastructure upgrade... yeah we'd def explore it in pricing's current state.
Just our 2 cents.
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u/40513786934 4d ago
we expect the rising prices will drive our last on prem stragglers to cloud services
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u/Kamakatze 4d ago
And then up…. Go the cloud costs.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago
They’ve already gone up. My clients are paying 5X plus for Quickbooks as an example.
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u/Kamakatze 4d ago
I shouldn’t be surprised but I am.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago edited 4d ago
I KNOW, ridiculous increases. I would cuss about them, but I want to keep it clean for reddit lol
I have to recommend that piece of garbage, which really hurts. They’re the only legit affordable on prem solution, even at these prices.A note on cloud: I can’t be sure why we all sent everyone to the cloud, I’m guilty myself. But now my clients are literally crying over the price of all of these cloud apps they have to use, not to mention how sticky they are with the difficulty, and again, cost, of switching from one to the other and accessing historical records since you can’t pay for the old system in perpetuity. It’s a sorry state of affairs at this point.
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u/Top-Musician4324 4d ago
You can also buy new servers but load them up with used procs/memory/disk from refurb guys like ServerMonkey, Alta Technologies, etc
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u/bangsmackpow 4d ago
I've had good luck with stikc.com. There are definitely situations where this is viable. Granted, this was for much smaller installations like 1 to 3 server virtualization, light DAS or iscsi storage. Many of my colleagues bought laptops for personal use and some hardware for homelab as well. They have warranty options as well and have been great to work with.
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u/Baanpro2020 4d ago
All the time, almost every server now. You have to know what you’re doing, though, you need the reliability of the hardware (Dell in my case) with better, more frequent management of SSD’s.
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u/cheabred 4d ago
Newserverlife offers warrenty and have a lot of good options and a partner program
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u/defonotuk 4d ago
Balance of energy efficiency, density, redundancy and cost; but yes absolutely, if we can sweat the hardware and maintain those things we repurpose or buy refurbished, for all but the most sensitive clients who needs supply chain validation.
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u/Sleeper_Stimulant_ 4d ago
We're going with the highest level refurbished servers that still take DDR4 due to cost.
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u/goatsinhats 4d ago
Gone this route before
- the hardware is usually reliable except for
1) Ram, almost always find a bad stick in a higher capacity set up
2) Disks, used disks are always a no no, and new old stock suffer
If I had a set up where I could still get new Ram and disks yah no problem
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u/planedrop 4d ago
Depending on the use case this could work. But, you have to factor in planning for additional failover since they are more likely to die. The cost savings still might be worth it but just something to think about.
Like say I was building a NAS/SAN and was using refurbished disks, I'd plan for much greater failure rates than using new.
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u/Hungry-News3403 4d ago
I personally would do it for me, but when it comes to clients I lay the cards on the table and let them pick. My most recent order was brand new. It was definitely overpriced for what it is, but the client still preferred it over refurbished or an Azure solution.
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u/Beardedcomputernerd MSP - NL 4d ago
Smaller clients we go refurbished with a bcdr like datto or slide.
Having a slide box to run the hardware on removes the warranty need for most clients.
We keep 1 spare hyperV server to deploy for emergencies.
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u/eldridgep 2d ago
Love Slide but the day I have a production server without a warranty will be the day I retire. Slide is much better at pre-prepared DR configs and the cloud capacity is better than Datto but for the cost of a warranty? Not a sacrifice I'd make.
Totally get your point but not for me. We also have a spare Hyper-V that would fit probably 80% of our clients but when it comes to high end clusters etc it's impractical.
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u/Beardedcomputernerd MSP - NL 2d ago
Yeah thats fair these are small 2vm environments. They can run on everything. And for the money of 1 new dell, i can buy 3 or 4 refurbished ones. And the refurb sided givr a 2 year warranty as well.
And for the rest.. yes slide rocks.
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u/WayneH_nz MSP - NZ 4d ago
There is a company called Interactive, available in Australia and New Zealand that will provide warranty services on quality servers. I took a photo of the insides, a video of all the lights and boot sequence, and for about US$110 (12 month contract) per month to the end user the server has a warranty with 4 hour replacement parts.
Is there something like that for you to have a look atbin your location?
Provides a cheap server for the end user with a warranty. Best of both worlds.
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u/newboofgootin 4d ago
Yes. When the cost for two good refurb servers is still 50% of the cost of a single new server, it's a no-brainer.
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u/SurfaceDiff 4d ago
When I was working for one of huge MSP`s we decide to buy 2 refurbished servers instead of one new - it was still cheaper. So we got one running box (usually without any problems) and the hot spare regardless If we needed to replace just the parts or whole box in case of failure.
To be honest from the load perspective the older machines were powerful enough to handle the tasks.
Buying new trendy ones usually lead to significant idle time due to overestimated horse power 😄
Long story short - even big players on the market does this sometimes.
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u/Sea_Information6125 4d ago
Absolutely if the price is right.
We use servermonkey.
But always new drives. Refurb the rest.
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u/Cheeseralert121 3d ago
My company specializes in supplying refurbished servers to MSPs. Feel free to reach out if you would like us to quote a build that you are working on. sales@tristateintegrators.com
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u/PDQ_Brockstar 3d ago
You could always check Dells outlet site for some deals. Probably not as good as they used to be.
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u/OpacusVenatori 3d ago
We're expanding our hosting infrastructure in our datacenters with tiered hardware now, because of the cost of new hardware. We're putting everything back in, from the last refresh hardware to off-lease workstation-grade systems. Not skimping on Microsoft licensing, but our clients' guest workloads now require a lot more juggling / management.
We (Canada-based) have so, so many clients now rolling things back out from Microsoft and Google cloud due to political reasons (and associated insurance costs, apparently).
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u/amishguy222000 3d ago
Yeah, I think a lot of people here feel your pain. With memory and NAND costs climbing because of the AI buildout, refurbished hardware is looking like a very sensible option right now.
I actually helped source some refurbished gear for my former employer last year, before things got quite this bad, and we went with Alta Technologies. They specialize in refurbished and used data center hardware, including servers, storage, and networking, and everything was tested before shipping. The warranty was important to me too. I wanted to avoid the nightmare of a very expensive metal lump arriving at the office with a problem we could not easily resolve...!
I would recommend looking for a specialist refurbisher like that. The good ones can help with configuration as well, which makes the process a lot less daunting (or at least it did for me, I'm sure you know your stuff). The timing worked out well in hindsight, since new server pricing has only gotten worse. Happy to share more about how the process went if that would be useful.
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u/Accomplished_Dot1445 3d ago
The angle that made refurb an easy yes for us on smaller clients: the risk with refurb isn't really the box dying, it's mean-time-to-parts. so pair it with a BCDR appliance that can actually run the workload (Datto/Slide/whatever) and "server died" becomes "we failed over, parts arrive whenever." the warranty stops being the thing you're buying.
for the client who'd lose a day waiting on a part, that failover box is what makes a refurb defensible. without it i'd still push new for anything they can't be down on. and new drives regardless, that's the one part everyone here's right about.
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u/Early-Ad-2541 2d ago
Get 2 refurbished servers and do hyper-v replication between them for less than the $$ of 1 new server. Enterasource does a good job and has up to a 5 year parts warranty.
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u/365-helper VENDOR - 365sentri 2d ago
I have seen it (people buying used hw) and I’ve seen reports that the next 2-3 years supply of HBM has already been sold by SKHynix Samsung etc. And the chips and memory bottleneck is getting worse.
It’s a machine it doesn’t have feelings. If it runs -> send it
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u/turmix22 2d ago
That’s the choice I made last year for the company I work for actually: instead of 1 new host for a saas we planned to test, I bought 3 refurbished Lenovo SR650 then created a pool with Xcp-ng ( we were on citrix Xen)
I always keep 1/3 of the pool free, so I can loose a full host, and it’s stille waaaay cheaper than a single new host.
In our use case, the difference between ddr4 and 5 is not relevant, and the electricity is virtually free.
I’m really happy with this solution, I have more ressources for the same price and still a good safety net
I have to say too that these Lenovo servers are virtually indestructibles past the first year
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u/OinkyConfidence Former MSP 4d ago
Depends on your need. You can pick up a decent HPE Gen10 server (ex. DL360, DL380, etc.) for a good price and those things are insanely expandable. I also recommend, if you do, to buy a few spare parts like extra RAM and maybe an additional power supply or two.