The Netherlands is the most connected country in the world and Amsterdam is an important international digital hub. Combine that with a reliable and favorable energy network and you have an ideal country to house datacenters. The Netherlands is on its way to become the number 1 data hub in Europe. And indeed Google, Microsoft and the alike already have and are expanding their datacenter presence in The Netherlands.
Typical for Dutch IT is their ambition to becoming more sustainable and work towards circularity; a model in which there is minimal/no waste.
Wouldn’t it be great if used hardware were to be given a 2nd, 3rd and almost endless life instead of ending up on landfills and pollute the environment?
Network equipment pre-eminently is suited for reuse. The little or no wear and tear parts to begin with are easily exchanged in routers, switches and security hardware. The ease with which parts can be replaced advocate long-term reuse. The refurbished parts business model stands as a model for contributing to the circular economy.
Does the network equipment user fully embrace refurbished parts or is some prejudice still to overcome? Networkworld last year published a.o. following considerations when buying network hardware:
- Most manufacturers only do spot checks on every 50th or 100th piece of hardware leaving their facility and won’t necessarily tell you the exact fail rate on new products. Good refurbished resellers run their testing process on every piece of hardware that they buy and once again when they sell it to guarantee 99.5% reliability rates or better.
- New network hardware failures occur within the first 30 days of implementation. Once networking hardware is “burned in” and has been working flawlessly for a while, it pretty much stays reliable throughout its lifetime. This provides another element of reliability.
- Having spares on-hand and ready to take over should any malfunction occur, just provides absolutely unrivaled peace of mind. But if you’re going with that really expensive new hardware solution, how in heaven name could you afford spares? If you opt to utilize refurbished equipment with its reduced price, you could give yourself much better options when it comes to hot, swappable spares. And that’s just a happy thought!
With refurbished equipment you can get a solution that’s the right size for your organization and your unique business needs, not too big and not too small. You can be the boss of what your network infrastructure consists of and how much you can afford to spend on it. And any money saved on networking hardware can be re-allocated to other areas of your business that need it.
Having said, refurbished hardware over and above contributes to a better world. Spoken broadly, moving towards a more circular economy could deliver benefits such as reducing pressure on the environment, improving the security of the supply of raw materials, increasing competitiveness, stimulating innovation, boosting economic growth and creating jobs (580,000 jobs in the EU alone). The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended.
In order to contribute to the development of a more circular networking industry, EmXcore recently became a partner of Green IT Amsterdam. This organization focuses on increasing energy efficiency and decreasing carbon emissions by scouting, testing and exploring smart IT solutions.
We are super excited to brainstorm and explore new ways of making the IT sector greener. If you, as a reader of this blog, have ideas about greening the IT sector, please do not hesitate to drop us a line at info@emxcore.com.
