Novastar Blog

To keep up with changing technology and improve user productivity, companies need to periodically update their personal computer fleets. Before new systems are installed, a decision must be made regarding what to do with the remaining retired equipment.

What To Do with Retired Computers

When retiring old computers the first thing you need to consider is safety. Devices still have precious data and can be an environmental hazard if not disposed of correctly. The first step is to ensure there is no sensitive data left on the hard drives of retired computers.

Drives can be wiped with multiple passes for increased security by using one of many free utilities available online. Some enterprises choose the additional step of physically destroying the drive either with a shredder or by puncturing a hole through the platter. The downside to this is that the drive cannot be repurposed for another system. In most cases, no traces of your sensitive data will remain on a drive if wiped properly. After wiping the drives, there are several things you can do to recover value from your retired IT assets.

1. Find an IT Reseller to Refurbish, Appraise and Remarket Your Retired IT fleet

Remarketing you retired computer equipment can help you recover value from your initial investment. However, it is not always economical or practical for a company to sell its fleet of used desktops, laptops or tablets on their own. Depending on the age and number of devices, it may be advantageous to seek out an IT Reseller who has experience refurbishing, appraising, and reselling computer systems.

This isn’t just because you’ll have to give up core activities to map out the logistics, costs, and marketing efforts. The biggest benefit is that value is added in the refurbishing process, maximizing the recovery of the original investment.

The refurbishing process includes cleaning, repairing, and combining systems so that they are in a functioning state. If resellers pack and pick up the equipment for you, it reduces the cost and hassle of disposing of retired IT assets. If some of the retired equipment is non-functioning or damaged, you can tear down the systems and salvage or sell individual components. Even if no value can be recovered from specific devices, an R-2 Certified Reseller has the ability to recycle e-waste in an environmentally-friendly and regulatory-compliant way.

2. Repurpose Old Computer Equipment to Reuse or Donate

In some cases, it may be best to repurpose old computers. It’s possible to repurpose older systems for a different use. For example, moving a powerful engineering workstation to an accounting function within an enterprise can be an upgrade from the current system. Or, if a company has a centralized server that can be accessed remotely, older systems can be set up as virtual terminals. By installing free operating systems such as a Linux distribution, these computers can be re-purposed with no additional software cost.

Another possibility for repurposing is to donate the old computers. Organizations such as primary and secondary schools, libraries, senior community centers, etc. would make great use of the equipment. Doing this not only helps those who need it, but it can also be written off for tax purposes.

3. Recycle Unsalvagable IT Assets to Avoid Fines and Protect the Environment

When computer devices have been determined to be at the end of their useful life, responsible electronic waste recycling is the best option. On its Electronics recycling webpage, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states:

“electronic products are made from valuable resources and materials, including metals, plastics, and glass, all of which require energy to mine and manufacture. Donating or recycling electronics conserves our natural resources and avoids air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas emissions that are caused by manufacturing virgin materials.”

The EPA also “encourages customers to choose certified electronics recyclers. Certified electronics recyclers have demonstrated through audits and other means that they continually meet specific high environmental standards and safely manage used electronics. Responsible electronics recycling provides important benefits, such as:

 
Illegal dumping of electronic waste in landfills may result in thousands of dollars in fines daily, as well as criminal penalties. It is important to understand options for retiring a company’s end-of-life IT assets to recover any residual monetary value by reselling and breaking down for parts or donating, as well as to be in compliance with e-waste regulations so as not to be at risk for fines or penalties.

An effective course of action can reduce the cost and productivity impact of upgrading to a new fleet. Have you evaluated your company’s options when it comes to retiring IT devices?

When it comes time for a business to upgrade its fleet of tablets, notebooks, laptop or desktop computers, options include renting, leasing or buying new or refurbished devices.

Generally speaking, renting is short term solution – for months, not years. Some examples are for trade shows, special limited time projects or temporary employees. Purchasing hardware gives a small business the power to define the length of the hardware cycle and sell the product for recovery of the initial cost at the end of the cycle. Companies need to examine the financial impact – buying creates capital assets that can be depreciated while leasing is treated as a monthly business expense.

Buying hardware, however, has the downside of a large initial purchase. It’s a challenge to determine when to retire hardware that is owned after it is out of warranty. Employees often desire the newest devices and a business owner may be more reluctant to replace equipment the company owns free and clear.

Leasing may be more favorable. Leasing offers monthly payments with the tradeoff of not having the hardware to sell at the end of the contract. There are often additional fees charged if leased equipment is not returned by the lease end date. At a certain point, all personal computing devices need to be replaced. Otherwise, a company may run the risk of down time from hardware failure or disgruntled employees who want newer devices.

Buying New Computer Equipment

One of the main concerns with purchasing new personal computing hardware is that its value decreases after it has been purchased – not unlike driving a new car out of a showroom.  Although new hardware comes with the advantage of being cutting edge and having the ability to be highly customizable when ordered; refurbished hardware can be a better value than buying new due to the low cost of acquisition, even if the new equipment is held for its life cycle.

Buying Refurbished Computers

When it comes to overall value, buying refurbished can be the best option.

The initial investment can be significantly lower than buying new.   A small business may feel freer to choose a shorter hardware cycle – replacing devices more frequently to keep up to date without worrying as much about the initial investment.

Some see buying refurbished as the best of leasing and purchasing new hardware. Swapping equipment more often on a shorter interval decreases the amount of risk due to hardware failure. This is insurance to prevent failing equipment and employee down time when waiting for repairs/replacements.   It also may keep employees happier because they get an upgraded device more frequently.

Computers have matured to a point where having the very newest equipment is not necessary to run most standard office applications.   Purchasing refurbished equipment that is appropriate for your work environment is likely to have no adverse effects on productivity. With technologies such as visualization, a fleet of older computers can be supported as terminals to a centralized server with virtual machines running on them. This decision should be made on a case-by-case based on applications required for a small business.

What business people worry about most when buying refurbished equipment is warranty – or lack of it. To reduce the risk, buying from an experienced re-marketer with a good reputation is key. Often a limited warranty is offered on refurbished equipment (three months versus typically one year on new equipment).   It is recommended to determine what the specific warranty is on used equipment before purchase.

Where to Find Refurbished Computers

Refurbished equipment can be found on eBay, Amazon, from OEMs and from companies who are experienced re-marketers. Websites such as Play It Again PCs provide quality refurbished equipment in a wide range of prices, brands, and quantities. Whether your small business has an expiring lease on a fleet of PC devices or has aging purchased hardware, buying refurbished equipment may provide the best return on investment without reducing productivity. Have you considered purchasing refurbished for your fleet?

Solid state drives offer the advantage of faster seek and read/write times an order of magnitude faster than traditional disk drives. However, the cutting edge speed of solid state drives has reached a bottleneck: the SATA interface. Currently, SATA 3.0 provides a limit of 600 MB/s for read and write speeds. For most applications, this may seem like an appropriate speed.

However, with large CAD designs and media files that need to be loaded to system memory, such as in the auto and film industries, going beyond this limit provides a higher rate of productivity; uncompressed project files continue to grow in size and complexity. Utilizing the higher bandwidth of PCIe slots on a system’s motherboard makes this possible.

PCIe Solid State Drive Performance Benefits

When it comes to sheer performance, PCIe cards such as The HP Z Turbo Drive G2 offer read speeds up to 2510 MB/s. This is up to four times the speed of a traditional SATA Solid State Drive for copying files. Relevant applications where these performance enhancements can be felt are in video editing and complex engineering simulation such as finite element analysis.

Drawbacks of PCIe Solid State Drives

Although these performance enhancements may seem like a sure-fire reason to make the switch from SATA to PCIe, it is important to understand the limitations of PCIe Solid State Drives. For example, the current price per gigabyte is more than SATA. It is also important to consider the limitations of where other bottlenecks may arise. For example, having twice the bandwidth to load a file to a local machine’s memory can be advantageous; however, this will not improve file transfer over a network if the bandwidth is not supported.

Another issue is workflow. For example, a 3ds file requires unpacking and compressing upon loading and saving, respectively. This requires that files loaded from a drive need to be handled by the system processor, resulting in little to no performance improvement with a PCIe card over a SATA card. Finally, another issue is the number of write cycles a PCIe card is capable of handling over its lifetime. This is stated as about one third that of SATA drives, although drives have been shown to outlive these benchmarks in production.

Weighing the Pros & Cons of PCIe SSDs

While this technology is not appropriate for every desktop, PCIe drives can provide a breakthrough if your particular application supports the added benefit. Shorter lifespans and higher cost can be overlooked if quadruple the speed for a particular application can be realized.

It is important to consider that the evolution from SATA to PCIe is an iteration rather than a leap as it was from mechanical to solid state drives. If your workflow utilizes the constant reading and writing of large uncompressed files for a local machine, it may be advantageous to get a cutting edge technology to improve your process. Do you see a potential use for PCIe solid state drives in your enterprise?

With an uncertain economy and competitive environment, every company is focused on the bottom line. Publicly traded companies have the additional pressure from Wall Street to produce positive short term results.

One of the biggest victims of cost reduction is the acquisition of new and value added assets. Critical systems that are necessary are typically accounted for, but it can be more difficult to obtain funding for hardware or software that fulfills long term needs.

This is applicable to requests for up-to-date CAD software and engineering workstations. Developers who use this technology understand the need to make these investments. However, tight budgets may lead to resistance in upgrading; administrators see an expense they would rather avoid. This results in a lack of appropriate resources for developers to do their jobs.

As a compromise, a group of developers in a department would share a few machines to get their work done. This practice is known as seat sharing. In theory, this sounds like an efficient use of resources. However, in practice, it can cause a number of problems for companies of any size. Here are four of them.

1. Seat Sharing Causes Diverted Resources

Sharing one or two machines is financially less costly than providing a workstation for each person in a department. What is left out of the equation when evaluating the cost to benefit ratio of buying additional hardware are soft expenses; coordinating how the resource will be shared becomes a new task. Conflicts will arise when multiple developers need to use the same machine. This diverts developers to become production schedulers when their time could be used more wisely.

2. Sharing CAD Equipment Creates Bottlenecks

Multiple developers wanting to use a machine at the same time creates a bottleneck; one developer has to wait while another finishes a task. For example, a developer may need a half an hour to execute a deformative model simulation. If another developer arrives at the workstation shortly after needing it, he or she must wait until the current process is complete. This downtime affects the overall schedule of a project as the next step of the design process is halted until the bottleneck is resolved. In a just-in-time design environment, these delays can have a serious impact on a business.

3. There is a Significant Loss in Productivity

In some cases, developers will resolve conflicts by stopping their jobs to allow another person to access a workstation. This not only stops the current workflow, but it may also interrupt a job in process that could result in a simulation being accidentally canceled or crashed. This causes another hidden cost: rework. It is difficult to measure or track the impact that rework creates when an incident occurs.

4. Seat Sharing Can Lower Employee Morale

Scheduling conflicts can be resolved by forcing developers to change shifts to spread out the demand on a workstation. This may seem like a reasonable solution to management, but asking people to work second and third shifts can cause resentment and a drop in morale. This may lead to developers leaving a job rather than work off-hour shifts.

There’s no question that businesses must be smart and creative when establishing their budgets. While seat sharing may look like a reasonable solution, the costs in productivity loss, rework, and lowered morale end up being more expensive than the lowered capital cost of purchasing less workstations. Taking this into account, seat sharing may not be the best choice.

3D printing has generated buzz in the manufacturing world, specifically with prototyping. The term “Additive Manufacturing” is being adopted in the industry, as it describes the production technique of building from the bottom up rather than shaping an existing piece of material. Additive Manufacturing creates products by layering and allows using a wide range of materials to build models. The process is developing rapidly, as methods that were not possible a year ago can now be accomplished.

Multiple Material Use

An advantage of Additive Manufacturing is the ability to use multiple materials in the construction of a model. The last eight months has shown breakthroughs in the use of alternative materials. For example, the cost, appearance, flexibility, and turnaround of models using metals in 3D printing has vastly improved over what was possible a year ago. Material options now include various plastics, polymers, sub polymers, and organic materials. Using edible materials to build food is now a possibility, such as building a customized cake.

In-house metal fabrication is now possible with Additive Manufacturing. A plastic prototyped model can now be coated with metal through a nano-scale electrolysis process. An electromagnet coupled with a depositing tip allows the metal to be assembled droplet by droplet. Inserting metal into a carved plastic model is no longer necessary to incorporate a mixture of materials; an entire prototype can be built from the ground up using all necessary materials.

Since Additive Manufacturing constructs a model one layer at a time, a model can now be made that would be difficult or impossible to make using traditional manufacturing methods. It is now possible to enclose one type of material in another. Voids inside of material can also be made as well.

Multiple Color Options

Until recently, using multiple colors in 3D printing involved swapping out spools, as machines could only hold from one to three colors. By combining various colors with a white polymer, it is now possible to use the entire color palette. This is similar to how an ink jet printer can produce the whole color spectrum from three colors.

Material costs are significantly reduced when a white polymer can be colored on demand, as it is no longer necessary to have an inventory of spools for each color that you would like to use. This allows staff and clients to be more creative in their prototyping.

The recent advancements of Additive Manufacturing have increased the value it can add to a business; it can help you remain competitive and respond to your market. Have you considered using Additive Manufacturing? Does Additive Manufacturing have an application for your business?

The Advantages of In-House Rapid Prototyping

The time it takes to develop a new product from design to manufacturing is critical in an on-demand world. This is especially true in the design phase. Traditionally, a model is designed and the assembly of a prototype is outsourced to a third party – often located overseas. This method is time-consuming and costly. As a result, more manufacturers are turning to in-house rapid prototyping, such as using a 3D printer to construct a model.

Here are seven reasons why the same approach should be considered.

1. In-house Prototyping Reduces Turn-Around Time.

Traditional outsourcing can take a week or more for a prototype to arrive due to transit time. In addition, internal development can cause more lag. Due to the time and expense involved, companies hesitate to request a prototype until they have something close to a finished model. Time and expense are less of an issue for in-house prototyping, as a physical model can be built on-site the same day. This can significantly reduce the timeline of overall development.

2. Rapid Prototyping Reduces Errors & their Associated Cost.

In addition to speeding up development, more frequent prototyping can also reduce costly errors that would arise from incorrect tooling. This reduces errors that would then become apparent in costly dies and molds that produce parts that do not fit together.

For example, when fitting a flange into a receptacle, making a mold to produce a prototype can reveal that the flange is slightly too large to fit. Re-making the mold to correct the problem is expensive so it is often not done. This is not necessary with rapid prototyping, as multiple revisions can be made within each iteration without the need to make a mold. Errors are reduced with this iterative process, and design changes are not compromised due to incorrect prototype dimensions.

3. In-House Boasts Huge Productivity Gains

Prototyping in-house reduces the lag time caused by waiting for prototypes to come back from a supplier, putting development at a standstill. This time is virtually eliminated when prototypes can be made on-site the same day, resulting in a more productive, cost effective development team.

4. In-House Prototyping Saves on Costs

The investment needed to perform outsourced prototyping is reduced by eliminating shipping and equipment costs when prototyping is performed on-site. Every instance when rapid prototyping can be done as opposed to outsourced prototyping will increase savings. By cutting out the vendor profit margin and shipping costs, more is saved as well.

5. Rapid Prototyping Increases Innovation

When faced with the costs and time lag of outsourcing, the most likely design is chosen to be made rather than creating various prototypes for a product. However, with in-house rapid prototyping, you are able to produce multiple prototypes with various features and iterations. This means hundreds of options can be tried in the time it would take for an outsourced prototype to come back from the vendor; Innovation is encouraged and the final piece is ensured to be the most appropriate design for your project.

6. Prototyping In-House Improves Security

Containing the prototyping process in-house means valuable designs are not sent to a third party who may or may not have the same security protocols in place. Maintaining control of the prototyping process from start to finish guards against piracy. Otherwise, the development of a new product could be undermined with plans being leaked by an insecure party.

7. Rapid In-house Prototyping is Future Proof

Advances in rapid prototyping technology have increased the scope of what can be done compared to a few years ago. Innovative designs can now be produced with various materials and colors at a fraction of former costs. The versatility to introduce exciting new products can be taken advantage of with in-house, rapid prototyping. Producing prototypes in-house eliminates time and cost issues related to outsourcing while keeping products at the forefront of the industry.

The transition to in-house, rapid prototyping is dramatically reducing the need for third party outsourcing and is increasing the effectiveness of product development teams. How are you handling the prototyping process? Have you considered bringing the process in-house?