> But in that context I'd only consider a used $350 card for dev/eval work. I don't want to tell the customer that his infrastructure was down for a few days because I convinced him to cheap out on a NIC.
I would argue that it strongly depends on the price differential and how resilient your system is. If your system is properly failure tolerant, and you can buy twice as much hardware for the same price by accepting a 20% failure rate (say), then it would be strongly advantageous to buy all used hardware.
I would argue that it strongly depends on the price differential and how resilient your system is. If your system is properly failure tolerant, and you can buy twice as much hardware for the same price by accepting a 20% failure rate (say), then it would be strongly advantageous to buy all used hardware.