First off lemme know if you want the name of the people we use for disposal / recycling. Second, you should find out if anything you have is able to be sold back. Admittedly you don't get much but it beats paying. (CRTs you're just SOL of course) Also for old equipment that works but you can't get money for, look into a church, private school, women's shelter, free clinic, etc. A lot of times they will pick up and take off your hands for no cost. And the company could get a tax deduction. Looks good on your review. And, helps the environment =)
Don't knock procurement we do our bestest. Knock the morons who developed your budget and make dang sure your 2008 capital expense requests include the racks you need.
If you let an HP service contract lapse yeah I can imagine why, since those things are freaking highway robbery. I've got a side project to go through every contract for our machines that's lapsed or will in 120 days and work up renewal costs for all still in the field. The printout of pages of HP contracts is almost one inch tall.*sigh*
I hate working for accountants.
No offense to any accountants we have.
Don't get me wrong. I'll take the paycheck for as long as they give it to me.
But there's some things that are just seriously wrong here.
Our server room:
The "rack", which holds our ~$8k of switches, routers, and patch panels, is not bolted to the floor, and instead is being "held up" by the trunk of patch cables extending into the ceiling. If we put anything bigger than a rackmount switch on it, it'll tip. (I've tried.)
One blade server, an ~$8k unit, has been powered on since March. It doesn't do anything. It rests across the top of a tower-model server.
The other blade server, an ~$5k unit, sits across the top of the 5-foot banquet table that acts as our "server storage."
We picked, out of the trash, a large steel server cabinet. However, it's a non-standard size, and it is too short to support the blade servers' standard rails.
Said rack above has a "new" used Cisco 2600 to connect our Internet. It was shipped from some office in Ohio, likely because they upgraded their Internet connection beyond what the 2600 would support.
Additionally, I was required to buy, off eBay, a 3600 switch, because they're not produced anymore and the Purchasing group wanted to take 2 grand out of our tech budget. I got it for ~440.
Our printers:
We have two HP LJ 8100 series printers that clock over 180k pages a month. A MONTH! And the specified duty cycle is just 150k. And that's not even in our busy season! I have a woman waiting to print -12- documents each totalling 300 pages or more.
They haven't been cleaned since last March. That is, March 06. Because the service contract was allowed to lapse. So now, when the most often-used printer is emitting a high-pitched squeak when printing, and white paper dust is sifting down through the unit when you open or close access panels, I can't even get it worked on.
Our hardware:
I have over 24 monitors laying around, collecting dust, 95% of which are damaged or defective. I can't throw them out; local and state law. I can't ship them out; they're 65+ pounds each.
I also have over 20 PCs in various states of "don't work" or "very old crap"ness that range from 8 to 20 pounds.
So I suggested getting them recycled. There are "material reclamation" companies that do this. I was given a budget of $500 to do that.
Then we find out that it costs .35 cents a pound for hauling, oh and I can't just toss em in a truck, I need to stack them a certain way on a palette, shrink-wrapped.
24 monitors x 65 pounds x 35 cents a pound = $546
20 pcs x average of 12 pounds x 35 cents = $84
To have the guy wrap/stack the crap = $48 bucks an hour.
(We can do this; it's easy to find palettes laying around stores, and stretch/shrink-wrap should be cheap at a shipping store)
mid-rant edit: It's taken me 25 minutes to write this. It has been an hour since the printer's squealing started. now it's dead. Woohoo!
Anyway, we need to do it piecemeal - the shipment and packaging of the old units - but the problem is, we have no way to get everything out of the building.
Well, we can carry 30+ pieces of hardware outside, to put on a palette to wrap... but there's no way to get the palettes into the truck. There's no loading dock.
*sigh* Now a third of the network is down. Thankfully, not my third, but I get to fix it.
Yay for job security.
Temprah
18 years ago
Mylec
18 years ago
Mil,
Have you looked into donating the stuff? There is a rather poor school district in my area that I have donated many PCs, monitors and printers to over the years. I tell them what I have and if they are interested (they always have been so far) they send a truck out to pick it up. Only cost a few minutes of time to gather up some of the other guys and haul the stuff to the docks. I know the hardware is old but sadly enough it is often better than a lot of the poorer disticts currently have, and they are always grateful for the donation. Just something to think about.
Oh, and I actually have 8 Cisco 3600XL 48 port switches still in production. We bought them about 6 years ago when they were new, but they have never given me a problem and have never gone down. I also have a Cisco 2600 router that we use to connect to one of our business partners. Cisco products just freakin work forever, unless you drop them or something lol. On the subject of storage racks, I would say your company is retarded if they don't spend some cash to protect their infrastructure. We just put in some new racks here a few months ago when we bought our new UPS and PDA from APC. I believe the empty APC equipment racks were around 1700 each. They may be more than that normally, we rolled them into the cost of the UPS and PDA, the whole thing ran about 85k.
Have you looked into donating the stuff? There is a rather poor school district in my area that I have donated many PCs, monitors and printers to over the years. I tell them what I have and if they are interested (they always have been so far) they send a truck out to pick it up. Only cost a few minutes of time to gather up some of the other guys and haul the stuff to the docks. I know the hardware is old but sadly enough it is often better than a lot of the poorer disticts currently have, and they are always grateful for the donation. Just something to think about.
Oh, and I actually have 8 Cisco 3600XL 48 port switches still in production. We bought them about 6 years ago when they were new, but they have never given me a problem and have never gone down. I also have a Cisco 2600 router that we use to connect to one of our business partners. Cisco products just freakin work forever, unless you drop them or something lol. On the subject of storage racks, I would say your company is retarded if they don't spend some cash to protect their infrastructure. We just put in some new racks here a few months ago when we bought our new UPS and PDA from APC. I believe the empty APC equipment racks were around 1700 each. They may be more than that normally, we rolled them into the cost of the UPS and PDA, the whole thing ran about 85k.
Mileron
18 years ago
Unfortunately we have a "permanent" company-wide contract with these people... Their main office is in Minneapolis or somewhere in BumFudge Midwest, and they subcontract for us little piddly offices elsewhere.
The prices quoted were "discounted."
This was a secondary option listed via the quotes we got from the recycling company. Unfortunately...
Due to federal laws regarding the stuff we deal with I need to have special federal or defense grade data destruction done on any hard drives. And none of the PCs are functional, but the hard drives all work.
Sure I can pull them but then I'd need a secure place to store them. Guess what? They won't buy me a safe or give me a secure lockup.
Or pay for said destruction.
I'm not knocking procurement. I'm knocking the morons. It just so happens Procurement gets as screwed by them as we do.
Hence the "hating working for accountants."*
Yeah, they are, and yet, HP are some of the most widely supported printers.
It's not the age of the products that worries me. I too am familiar with the long-livedness of Cisco products; in regards to that part of the rant I'm more complaining about the fact that they bought it -used- and through -ebay- than anything else.
As far as the rest, you're right, they are retarded.
I even have an APC 2200 with a dead battery that won't get replaced until Jan 08... because there's no budget for it. Uhm, wtf? No "if Shit Happens" budget? double wtf. So we had to play "juggle the multiple power supply cords" to make sure each of the servers has one supply running from that, and had to move all the routers/switches/etc, which had solely used the affected one, to another unit.
Additionally, the printer went back on after 30 minutes off, but it's still making the squeal. When I informed the office about it working again, I added the location of the nearest fire extinguishers.
*In Oct 05 I visited an Accountancy/Law firm that was headed by 3 Techy guys and 2 Accountant. They had a nearly unlimited tech budget. They had a lab. A drop floor cooled server room with racks and redundancy out the wazoo. Hardware replacements every 18 months. An internet connection that could support over 500 people... for an office of 90. Telecommuting. The things you'd expect from a company in the 21st century.
It was akin to Tech Support nirvana.
This place often feels like it's still stuck in the late 80s.
Temprah;87667
First off lemme know if you want the name of the people we use for disposal / recycling.
Unfortunately we have a "permanent" company-wide contract with these people... Their main office is in Minneapolis or somewhere in BumFudge Midwest, and they subcontract for us little piddly offices elsewhere.
The prices quoted were "discounted."
Second, you should find out if anything you have is able to be sold back.
Also for old equipment that works but you can't get money for, look into a church, private school, women's shelter, free clinic, etc. A lot of times they will pick up and take off your hands for no cost. And the company could get a tax deduction. Looks good on your review. And, helps the environment =)
Sure I can pull them but then I'd need a secure place to store them. Guess what? They won't buy me a safe or give me a secure lockup.
Or pay for said destruction.
Don't knock procurement we do our bestest. Knock the morons who developed your budget and make dang sure your 2008 capital expense requests include the racks you need.
Hence the "hating working for accountants."*
If you let an HP service contract lapse yeah I can imagine why, since those things are freaking highway robbery. I've got a side project to go through every contract for our machines that's lapsed or will in 120 days and work up renewal costs for all still in the field. The printout of pages of HP contracts is almost one inch tall.*sigh*
We bought them about 6 years ago when they were new, but they have never given me a problem and have never gone down. ... Cisco products just freakin work forever, unless you drop them or something lol. On the subject of storage racks, I would say your company is retarded if they don't spend some cash to protect their infrastructure.
As far as the rest, you're right, they are retarded.
I even have an APC 2200 with a dead battery that won't get replaced until Jan 08... because there's no budget for it. Uhm, wtf? No "if Shit Happens" budget? double wtf. So we had to play "juggle the multiple power supply cords" to make sure each of the servers has one supply running from that, and had to move all the routers/switches/etc, which had solely used the affected one, to another unit.
Additionally, the printer went back on after 30 minutes off, but it's still making the squeal. When I informed the office about it working again, I added the location of the nearest fire extinguishers.
*In Oct 05 I visited an Accountancy/Law firm that was headed by 3 Techy guys and 2 Accountant. They had a nearly unlimited tech budget. They had a lab. A drop floor cooled server room with racks and redundancy out the wazoo. Hardware replacements every 18 months. An internet connection that could support over 500 people... for an office of 90. Telecommuting. The things you'd expect from a company in the 21st century.
It was akin to Tech Support nirvana.
This place often feels like it's still stuck in the late 80s.