The expert view Steve Cassidy

I once did a job for a charity whose patron was Princess Anne. One afternoon, some time after I’d rebuilt most of its server room, I was hunkering down behind the rack when the door popped open and there stood HRH. Used to seeing a motley mess of desk-side, bottom-end servers, she surveyed the cluster of rackmounts I’d installed and said, “Those look expensive. Where the **** did they come from?” “eBay, Ma’am,” I said. Refurb machines confer one vital advantage: they let you break out of the slapdash and cavalier assessments of what right-sizing really means for your sector. We’ve all seen the alleged headcounts supportable by a “small business” server sold with a single disk and a motherboard that looks like it fell out of a 1990s mobile phone.

Then there are the staggering prices for equally incapable NAS devices. For the sort of money you would pay a NAS vendor, you can buy a fantastically over-engineered ex-corporate (or better still, ex-government) top-end workstation or enterprise grade server.

I’ve built up a variety of sources for good refurb kit over the years, mostly on eBay. One such, originally known by its eBay handle of “ed_the_ bear”, has now gone all corporate at etb-tech.com. Same deals, same grade of kit: just a change of name to placate the querulous. Perhaps my finest eBay blag was some HP servers, in their custom rack, with keyboard tray, liberated from the semi-secret income tax cheque processing centre in (mumble) Yorkshire. They had upgraded, and the managers told the IT contractor to sell the old kit.

You’ll notice I haven’t yet mentioned laptops, despite many people thinking of these when they go for refurb. Be careful, because laptops live the hardest of lives and are in the highest demand.

Instead, think infrastructure. I like to put enterprise-grade LAN switches into smaller businesses by buying secondhand – dead easy, as long as you’re careful about the cooling fans – replacement can be expensive. My most ambitious refurb switch was €7,500-worth of pitch black, wardrobe-size HP ProCurve kit, bought from a specialist fibre broker in southwestern Germany.

The drive there and back was worth it on two counts. One, the savings: black ProCurves at the time were €47,000 in this configuration. And two: the expression on the customs officer’s face when I popped open the boot and told him that my Japanese import Subaru was worth one-twelfth of the list price of the switch it was carrying.

All these systems ran smaller organisations than their spec sheets imply. The HP servers went to the London Cycle Campaign, the black ProCurve to some lawyers. And they’re excellent proofs of concept in buying refurb, because all of them ran for at least half a decade. Most were replaced before failure, rather than dying in the saddle. These days I think people who insist on new are odder folk than those who join me in the dumpster.