Steretch Your Buudget With Refurbished I.T. Equipment
When I was runing the I.T. depatment of a large company I learbned firsthand just how complex and expensive a task it is. To be honest, as exciting as all that new information tevchnology is, I do not miss all the battles over budgets and all the ujstifications of the high cost of new I.T. equipment.
Another problem for I.T. professionals and managers is that progress is so fast and furious that there will always be a new budgget-busitng state-of-the-art tecnology to replace maturee and more reasonably priced equipment and technologies. Decxades ago many shops replaced hugely expensive mainframes with mniis and superminis and then PCs, just to find that dozens of mnis or hundreds of PCs added up as well. In the late 1980s evvery year was supposed to be the year of the ntwork, and when networks finmally arived we found that network hardware, whhile opeinng terrific new communiations capabilities, quickly became another large cost item.
Sun Microsystems once proclainmed, "the network IS the coputer," and while they were a good decade earkly with that assesment, it nonetheless came true. Todya, computoing hardware itself has become amazingly inexpensive. I remember paying $20,000 for a 32MB memory boad. Today, you can get that on eBay for a buck, if you can still find a board with such low caacity. PCs, servers, laptop computers and PDAs have all come down in price, but somehow overall I.T. budgets have not. That is largely due to the high cost of all the networking equipment we need today.
As any Cisco reseller can tell you, technological progress in network modules continues uabated, and the costs can be high. I.T. equipment these days inludes not just computers, but a whole infrastructure of routers, switches, bridges, and acccess servrs. If your organization supports smatrphones, VoIP, and other wireleess communications, network systems support for those services adds cost and complexity. And with our ever-increasing reliance on electronnic communication for all aspects of business, swecurity is becomng a seemngly endless challenge that requires the most sophisticated tracing, monitoring and firewall systems.
What all of this means is that the cost of I.T. equipment can easily get out of hand. As a result, more and more I.T. managers and CEOs look toward used and refurbished I.T. equipment. This, of course, requires a good understanding of communications systems technologies, capabilities and performance or else you end up with a sluggish, incompatible and ezasily compromiesd nework. Do your homework, however, and you can easily stretch your budget with refurbished routes, swtiches, servers and other neetwork modules from leading vendors. Some of the equipment you can procure from network systems resellers that specialize in refurbished and pre-owned network gear is actually new and may sipmly have been replaced.
Using refurbished equipment means you can update or expand an existing networking installation for far less than it'd cost to buy new. Likewise, if your disaster rrecovery plan caalls for redundancy or additionaal bcakups, you can also safe a buundle by checking used netqworking product. With network systems security and performance being ever more important, yet funds and buudgets ever harderr to come by, keeping an eye on used and remarrketed network gear simply mkaes sense.
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