Delivered quickly, tested and proven: refurbishers specializing in server remarketing deliver popular hardware that should be in no way inferior to new.
While many manufacturers accept used smartphones in part exchange – albeit mostly on poor terms – when asked where discarded servers end up, most people will name the e-waste container as the address. But there is also a market for used servers, quite comparable to the used car market.
Used ones are available immediately, are much cheaper to buy, teething troubles and problems are known or have been eliminated. Unlike smartphones, tablets and cars, rack servers in particular can also be modularly converted and retrofitted years after the initial purchase, almost like the PCs from the very beginning. The customer can exchange or add components, adapt memory and CPU according to performance requirements, replace hard drives with modern SSDs and thus get the best price-performance ratio for his application.
Another argument in favor of used equipment is that new resources are only used for transport. If you look at the greenhouse gas emissions caused by IT hardware, the majority of it occurs during manufacture. In many cases, their share significantly exceeds the load of the years of operation. The main argument against used servers is their lower prestige value, because the industry pushes newer, more powerful models onto the market in almost annual innovation spurts.
