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Ask HN: What happens to datacenter's servers once outdated?

17 points by blaze33 ↗ HN
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?

Dumped as garbage? Shipped to poor countries? Recycled? Sold? (Like we could buy custom servers like Google or facebook have). Just curious :)

10 comments

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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.
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.

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.

jason_slack
Wow, this same thing happened to me. I bought some 1U Sun machines on eBay and the Seller was going to be around my area (3 hours away) because his wife was attending a seminar. He personally delivered them to me and had several hours to kill so he helped me rack several of them and we went for some lunch.

Interesting enough, he had these servers to run his "craft pencil" business where him and his wife made fancy pencils and sold them. I'm not sure why he needed more than 1 server to handle this (and Sun no less)(or even shared hosting) but I got a great deal.

joezydeco
I had a SuperMicro 1U in my home for a little while when doing a project. Holy crap the fans on that thing were deafening.

I suppose there's no need to spend money on quiet cooling when they're going to be loaded into a warehouse of racks. I had to move it to the basement where I could still hear it at night.

gtsteve
> 2x160GB

Probably it was stock that never got used in that case. You'd never find liquidated servers with hard disks normally.

Disks are normally destroyed mechanically. About 10 years back I worked for a company that had this mechanical press that would gouge a large hole in the hard disk, shattering the platters but with SSDs I think industrial shredders are more likely.

It's probably very wasteful but better than leaking data I guess.

dpe82
Not everyone follows best practices.
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
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.
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.