You’ll Get Genuine Manufacturers Parts In Your Refurbished Equipment

At Computer Merchants we are often asked where our second hand equipment comes from and how old it is. These may seem like important questions but the most important question is really

“Will I be able to put the equipment under maintenance cover with my maintenance supplier?”

This is important because once it is covered by a maintenance agreement, hardware failure will be fixed exactly the same as if you had purchased the equipment brand new from the manufacturer. The “regarding where the equipment came from” question becomes irrelevant.

The Dangers of Non-Genuine Manufacturer’s Parts

One of the few things that can stop you getting maintenance cover is if the features installed in a chassis are not genuine manufacturer’s features.

We see this time and again when a company purchases a system that is sold with the seller’s warranty and then tries to put the system under maintenance with the manufacturer.

They then discover that what they have purchased may have the correct amount of memory but it turns out to be a cheap copy, or it may have the 36GB disks that don’t carry the correct firmware to correctly communicate with the operating system.

The dangers here, apart from not being able to get hardware maintenance, is that in the case of incorrect disks, the original parts are designed to interact with the operating system to report what may be a pending disk failure. Without the correct firmware installed this will not happen.

So the first time you know of a pending disk crash is once it has already happened.

The other effect of using incorrect parts is overheating of the whole chassis and components. Most servers are engineered to dissipate a certain amount of heat. Fans are sized and components are manufactured to tolerate a temperature range. If these ranges are exceeded then systems fail intermittently and eventually altogether.

Tip For Checking Parts For IBM pSeries Machines

In IBM pSeries systems, it is an easy matter to check that you have received what you have paid for. Simply run the command “lscfg -vp” then check for fields that have question marks or a part number that doesn’t follow the following convention:

NNANNNN where N=0 to 9 and A=a to z

Memory should report with the size in MB. If you are unsure about how to do this or want someone to check then contact your Computer Merchants Rep who will be able to help you.

Getting The Right Parts With Computer Merchants

It is really important for our customers to expect and receive what they have contracted to purchase. You can be sure that when you purchase disk or memory or adapters for your IBM, Sun or HP server from Computer Merchants, you will receive the genuine manufacturers product.