Thursday, March 5, 2009

Used Server Sales

In tough economic times like we find ourselves in, resourceful IT Managers are looking for alternatives solutions to upgrading, updating or simply maintaining their servers and networking equipment. The used equipment market for servers and networking equipment is emerging as an excellent alternative to the high price of new equipment. Depending on their IT needs and the age of your equipment, Off Lease or Off Rent equipment may be a cost saving source for IT professionals and small companies alike.

Companies in the Technology Rental Business such as www.rentacomputer.com often have specials on equipment when it is returned from a Desktop Rental, a Laptop Rental, Audio Visual Rental and other types of equipment as well.

At the moment the special offer is on Entry Level Dell Servers. They are priced at $995. A refurbished Dell server just back from rentals is the perfect solution for a small business looking for, among other things, an affordable solution for file and print sharing. Here are the specifications:

Dell Poweredge 840 Server
Dual Core Xeon 1.86ghz processor
2GB Memory
Dual 160GB Hard Drives – Raid 1
CDROM Drive
Powervault 100T DAT72 Internal Tape Drive
Symantec Backup Exec Software
Windows Server 2003 with 5 user CALS
Here is the link.

If you have a need for Networking/ IT or standard PC equipment, don’t overlook used equipment from Rental Dealers, solid equipment for a fraction of the price of new.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

IBM server bug may cause data loss

IBM Xseries server

IBM recently released a support article for their Blade Center and System X servers containing drives with the following model numbers:

ST31000340NS
ST3250310NS
ST3500320NS
ST3750330NS

The article states that the hard drives may become unresponsive after a power cycle when the drives attempt to create an event log event in an invalid location, and the drive goes offline. Once the drive goes offline, the data is inaccessible.

IBM is working on getting the firmware update for the hard drives to solve the problem, but until then IBM advises to power cycle the affected servers as little as possible.

To check if your server includes one of the affected drives, view the list of models in IBM support article H194623.