HP servers are some of the most respected in the industry, but when you’re trying to persuade yourself to spend money on servers, making the case to invest in specific hardware requires more than just a brand name. Any server can be expensive, and you may be wondering whether you could save a bit of money by buying preowned.

The answer is that yes, you can – and often it makes sense to do so. Let’s take a look at 5 refurbished Proliant servers benefits, and why refurbs make sense.

1 – A Refurbished Server Still Has a Warranty

When you buy a refurbished server, it does still come with a warranty. Depending on the age of the server and whether you buy it through a reseller or direct from HP, the warranty may be shorter than what you’d get with a brand new machine, but it still covers you so that you can get it in there, get it set up, and do some testing yourself. It’s highly unlikely that the server will die on you immediately after the warranty runs out – servers are built to last. In most cases, they’re either DOA because of damage in shipping, or they’ll work without issue for years.

2 – Refurbished Servers Save You Money

This is, of course, the most obvious out of the top 5 refurbished Proliant servers benefits. When you buy a refurbished server, you know exactly what you’re getting – a server with the tech specs of the new model, but at 15 to 50 percent off. It’s hard to deny that kind of value, and if you need to build a substantial server farm on a budget, then that’s the way to go. Sometimes, you can pick up a couple of refurbished servers within your original budget, so you will have spares for if the worst were to ever happen.

3 – Refurbished Servers Have Been Well Tested

When it comes to mission critical kit, you need to know that it’s going to work, and work well – and that’s exactly what you will get with refurbished servers. You don’t have to worry about them having untested hardware in them. Usually, refurbs are at least a few months old, so if you’re looking at a newer model you’ll know that you’ve waited long enough for the kinks to be worked out and to be confident that the server will ‘just work’. You escape the headaches that the early adopters faced.

4 – You Can Count on The Community

Again, because you’re buying something that has been bedded in to other company’s IT infrastructure, you can expect to have fewer headaches yourself. This is one of the more overlooked out of the top 5 refurbished Proliant server benefits. You can go online and look for help with the products that you’ve bought, and be pretty confident that you will get support for them. It’s not guaranteed that every problem will be a known one – but if you’re not on the bleeding edge with the servers you’re installing, then there’s a better chance of being able to get help.

5 – You Can Find Hardware That’s Difficult To Source Elsewhere

The lifecycle of servers is pretty short these days as new processors, new memory standards and even new drives are coming out. HP will try to keep a few options on the market at all times, but they’re not going to be able to stock every model. If you want to keep every server in your farm the same for support reasons, then you might not be able to buy new. If you’re forced to look at the second hand market, then an official refurbished server is generally a better choice than a used one sold as seen on eBay or through a less specialist vendor.

Refurbs have been serviced and inspected. In many cases if they did have a fault, the faulty part has been replaced with a brand new one – or you could even be buying a new server that is just ex-display or that had a damaged box. The quality of the product is not in question, so you can shop with confidence.

Making the case to buy a refurb isn’t always going to be easy. Your managers may want the prestige of buying new, or may just be dubious that the server’s processor may “only have so many cycles in it”, but that’s not really how it works in IT. As long as the server can run the software and operating system that you need it to you don’t have to worry about the age too much. The performance will be the same no matter whether the box is unopened or someone else has ran the product for a little while.

If you’re concerned about warranty, well, an indirect result of these 5 refurbished Proliant servers benefits is that you can, in addition to the seller’s warranty (however long that may be) use some of the money that you have saved to purchase a support package with a good SLA that will ensure that you never have to worry about what will happen if the server breaks down. You can get instant repairs, replacements, drive recovery and other assistance to make sure that your IT services keep going with as little downtime as possible due to hardware problems.