Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) provide a full range of servers from standalone, mid-range and high end rack-mount to blade architecture with the inclusion of workstations and storage hardware (formerly StorageTek).     Prior to and during the dot.com boom at the beginning of the last decade – Sun microsystems were the customary go to for most enterprise solutions due to their ultra-reliable SPARC processor, Solaris operating system and rock solid hardware. Customers knew their web server and database applications would achieve 99% reliability and uptime therefore increasing IT efficiencies.

Since then, the Sun Ultra SPARC (Scalable Processing ARChitecture) chip ñ which can also be found in the Fujitsu Prime-power range of serverís has successfully delivered colossal amounts of data to a huge number of companies and organisations worldwide ranging from the finance sector, government, manufacturing, to retail, healthcare and internet/Media.

However, now with the increase in cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service), which is set to double year on year as a result of business turning to hosted applications the need for high-end number crunching servers and storage for some organisations is and will become less of a requirement.

Still, in most cases the Data centres behind the cloud are powered in some way by a Sun / Oracle hardware and or application most of the time ñ proof of their sustainability and reliability.

With the above in mind, there has never been a better time within the used server, workstation and storage hardware market for an organisation to save thousands of pounds going down the used and refurbished route.  For example; consider buying a brand new server for £10,000+ (also look at its depreciation value over three years) now compare this to purchasing a used Sun SPARC, Coolthread or x86 server with 8 cores, 32Gb memory and half a terabyte of storage for a little as £1500.00+ (Example T2000, 8Core 1.2Ghz, 32Gb RAM, 4 x 146Gb disk drives)

Add to that you can buy additional independent third party maintenance at a fraction of a manufacturer price. Choose from one, two or three year support  periods with the ability to see everything under one support contract – lowering capex and opex therefore simplifying overall operations.

We don’t want to discourage anybody from taking the cloud option or from buying brand new equipment ñ but for test bed environments, small internal networks or your own internal cloud and application server, buying a used and refurbished sun server should not be tarnished with the same brush as buying a used PC.