We’ve got a few E6900s at work that we’re looking to move on. We’ve had one quote which is pitifully low.

Can the hive recommend any IT outfits who buy used SPARC kit?

We couldn’t even give ours away so we ended up trading it in against new stuff with HP 🙁

I doubt you’ll find many people that would want them, sad but true. As retro did, if you’re looking to buy new kit you might be able to get a competitor to trade them in as part of a deal sweetener.

Alternatively, if you can be bothered, break them and sell the components (or the whole thing) on Ebay. I sold a load of old SBUS parts on there some years ago from various loft dwelling machines, there’s probably a lot of home enthusiasts out there still that would want the cards for smaller machines.

If you put the entire machine(s) on you might get lucky with a smaller IT shop looking for spare parts. I used to work for Sun and when we upgraded all of our Enterprise series (4500s mainly) we sold quite a few of them to a big company as spares were hard to find.

Edit: Duh, just realised you’re talking about SF6900 so no sbus. Even harder to shift I expect.

We’ve been thinking about splitting for parts, some of the prices of systems boards on eBay is still pretty high. Though I doubt the powers that be will let us go that route TBH.

We’ve already replaced them with new sparc kit, so trade in is out.

I can understand the powers that be probably not wanting to go that route. Problem is if the company (understandably) wants no exposure (it’s not like you can provide a warranty or anything like some resellers might) then your only other option really is to sell to someone that can resell. That means you’ll get very little for them.

If the company is small enough maybe you could offer to buy them yourself as scrap and then sell on Ebay independently of your employer. They get shot and a bit of money back, you potentially make enough for some shiny bike bling (or you have some nice garage heaters).

You should have negotiated a trade in for the old kit when you bought the new. If nothing else then you would now have somewhere to send them and the numbers make it look like you got something for them.

Plus most places would rather give you a trade in value on old kit rather than additional discount as it does not set future pricing expectations so you can often negotiate a lower overall price.

Just my 2p’s worth.

we use one ( because we have to) but I doubt we need another!I’ll ask at work just in case but I doubt it!

I wasn’t involved in the buying of the new kit, other than casting my eye over the spec, but point taken.

Buying then punting on has been discussed, unlikely though as they’re several hundred miles away, and I’ve no storage for three 6900s! 😕

The system boards should be sellable, surely? We have a couple here but we’re moving off Solaris/AIX and moving mainly to Linux. Once Oracle bought SUN it was the writing on the wall….!

The boards could be used to increase someone’s unfilled slots.

Oh. Ooer. 😀