
Ask HN: What happens to datacenter's servers once outdated? - blaze33
With an evergrowing cloud of datacenters, constantly updated offers with better and cheaper servers, what does actually happen when those servers eventually end up being replaced?<p>Dumped as garbage? Shipped to poor countries? Recycled? Sold? (Like we could buy custom servers like Google or facebook have). Just curious :)
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dpe82
A lot of them get bought by liquidators who clean them up and list them on
ebay. Search for "server" and you'll find lots of listings like "Supermicro
1U-Intel Quad Core 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 2x160GB" where there are hundreds of
a given configuration available.

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leetbulb
I once purchased a lot of 20x dual-Xeon (1st gen) DELL servers from a
liquidator on eBay. They were extremely cheap. The seller personally delivered
them in a van on a four hour drive because that's what made financial sense
due to the shipping weight.

They were fun to play around with and it was definitely an experience.
However, having them around became old quickly and flipping them was much more
difficult than I had originally thought. Luckily I ended up breaking even,
even after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.

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KhalPanda
> The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive

> ... after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.

Heh, and the cycle continues.

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ThePhysicist
I once spoke with the director of one of the largest research data centers in
Germany, and I asked him exactly that. He said that most of the hardware would
get scrapped as there is no market for it since the required infrastructure
(racks, cooling units and power supplies as far as I understood) is so
specific that there’s very little use for the devices outside their original
environment. That was for pretty specialized hardware of course, so it might
be different for data centers that are built using more off-the-shelf
components.

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ketralnis
There are companies that specialise in reselling them. Several jobs ago my
company bought most of its server hardware used from North Bay Networks, which
as I understood it got its inventory when places like Stanford and Pixar did
large hardware refreshes

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juangacovas
Hetzner provider in Germany offers "auction" servers for good price: they are
customized and/or outdated servers that customers cancelled so they can rent
them for an extended period of time.

