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Hey Spiceheads,

Always a pleasure to reach out to the best community that the tech world has to offer. I wanted to see if you guys sell your company’s excess/dated networking equipment to vendors who buy back said equipment? How does that process work?

Many thanks for your insight and may the spiciest answer win.

30 Spice ups
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If they’d buy back easily sure, some run trade-ins every now and again.

Mostly it goes through a charity auction and whats left gets recycles - can you spell WEE (yes we’re still in the EU here in the UK)

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If I know I don’t have a use for it in the next while (at least 6 months) I will happily trade it off for other resources.

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Normally we don’t, but this year we re-sold some VOIP hardware that was still in its service life.

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Normally our stuff is so old it goes to the scrappers. If it has limited use, we divy it up among the IT team but nobody else as we don’t want to be responsible for something old.

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Nope. Old equipment either goes to our backup site, or to a recycle pile.

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Typically we’ll do a quick search to see if a piece of gear still has a market value. If so, the company has an eBay account to sell surplus stock and we’ll use that.

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I came into a position where the guy before me bought a lot of “toys” and devices we didn’t need or weren’t the best choice. As a result, I’ve been selling off switches, about $1,000 worth of labels, excess hard drives (unused), and other knick knacks for the past year through Amazon.

Typically though, we run stuff into the ground so no use in selling by the time we get done with it. Just trash it.

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If it doesn’t work or is out-of-date and cannot be used, to the recycler it goes.

I do keep spares of routers, switches, hard drives and other components in the event a failure occurs.

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No excess.

Retired gear does a second tour at the DR site or gets recycled along with the stuff that is “all used up”.

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I used a vendor to sell some old Cisco ASA’s we were swapping out. We didn’t get much but the process couldn’t be easier. They asked for a quantity and number of boxes, scheduled a pickup, then mailed me a check. Made a few K selling them off plus a credit for remaining maintenance so I was happy.

TCDigital was the company - http://www.tcdigital.com/

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You guys are the best. Loving all of the feedback. Has anyone else used TCDigital or another company?

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You should have included a poll at the top. I’d be interested what the majority say at a quick glance.

For me, i usually run stuff into the ground and then look for a recycler. To be honest, this always comes down to time. Some recyclers I have to chase around which makes tossing it into the garbage seem like a better/faster option. Time is money after all.

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Generally it only comes out of our live production when it dies or is end-of-life for support. If the former, we trash it. For perfectly good but too old to get updates equipment, I like to ask around to the local vocational high schools to see if any of them want it for their labs. Beater switches and routers for the student to practice on are usually appreciated, and it saves me having to pay disposal costs.

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Yup. And we will buy yours if the price is right. We sold a couple of ubr 7200’s when we got our CMTK10000. We buy 3750’s and cards for our 4500’s as we need them.

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I work for a college, in a way we do but usually it’s just PCs with OEM OS. Once we finish with a PC usually 6-9 yrs old we sell at the school bookstore for like 20-50$ depending on spec, condition, etc.

The network stuff we usually send off to instructors that can use it. Old switches, etc go to the network program, sometimes we’ll donate them to some non-profit. If it’s totally junk it goes to recycle or if it has something of significance it will go to the electrical program for them to see how it works, see why it failed, etc.

A portion of it if there is no use for there anymore we I.T people can take it and do something with at home.

I think if you can giving something a 2nd life is the best option. We have been looking for a router for NAT, but don’t have budget for a ~$5,000 router so trying to see if our ISP can get us some of their old gear. Would think another company like our size would have upgraded and replaced one be nice to get one donated or at least somewhat more affordable.

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If it is buyback system than sure. whatever the negotiation on that is a matter aside. We got exchanged a Cisco Switch with a vandor.

But while doing so, I will make sure that…

1] Configuration Bakeup is taken properly with date and time stamp and kept at a safe place

2] Take backup of Licences if any (additional is there)

3] The most Important, To reset it to its Defaulf State OR Wipe Out all the configurations that my Internal Network will be safe

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At my old gig. old EOL workstations would get sold off on the private auction site.
Most recently, they sold off their old Shoretel phone system to the local county fairgrounds.

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We have 20 different locations (mostly high schools) with normally one or two under renovations. So the sites that are under renovation have funding to get new equipment so the old equipment normally either gets used as spare parts or goes to other (older) sites for additional needs. Anything that is left that can’t be traded in is offered up to out IST shops (we are a technical high school system and have some Information System Technologies shops where kids are supposed to learn about IT subjects) or is put on a public auction site. Normally when we are done with it it is so old that not many want it.

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There are plenty of resellers/refurbishers that will buy up used bulk equipment and they are generally pretty easy to work with. If I had enough gear to make it worth the effort, I’d call a few and see what they offer.

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