A couple of weeks ago we were fortunate enough to have received our 60,000th sale! Over the past decade, we’ve dealt with every type of business under the sun… from schools to banks, IT companies to charities.
We’ve shipped to over 100 countries from Switzerland to Singapore… Australia to Canada.
And we’ve built custom configurations for our clients to meet their IT hardware needs, whether that’s to increase bandwidth, provide backups, virtualisation or for CAD engineering …
Whatever the company, country, or configuration… we’ve probably done it! So to bring back some nostalgia, we’ve decided to identify 6 solutions that are our favourite!
School saves £300k with refurbished hardware 💷
Location: Essex, UK
Hardware: Cisco Catalyst Switches, Dell PowerEdge R620 and R820 Rack Servers, Dell PowerVault SAS Storage SAN
Budget: £120,000
Key selling points: Exceptional customer support, designed a complete solution that fit the customers’ requirements and budget.
An IT Manager who works for a multi-academy trust responsible for the IT infrastructure of six schools approached Intelligent Servers when he was tasked with a large infrastructure overhaul project. The project included replacing the entire fibre and copper Network Switch infrastructure as well as upgrading all of the current Server infrastructure.
The Trust had a few resellers quote new HP ProCurve/Aruba solutions, with most quoting over £350,000. Intelligent Servers came in at £80,000 using Refurbished Cisco Catalyst 6509’s at the Core, giving the customer multiple media types. Since the Trust saved over £200,000 on Networking, the IT Manager had budget leftover to upgrade his ageing Dell R610 Servers to 11 Dell PowerEdge R620’s and R820’s. Again, they saved over £90,000 by choosing refurbished from Intelligent Servers instead of new direct from Dell.
It wasn’t just the huge savings for the customer that made this order so notable, but the review that the IT Manager left us on Google is probably our favourite review! You can read the five-star review below.
Our first Synergy solution out the door 🚚
Location: Madrid, Spain
Hardware: Synergy 12000 Frame, Synergy 480 Gen10 Blade Servers, HPE 3PAR 8450 StorServ
Budget: £70,000
Key selling points: Huge savings when choosing refurbished from Intelligent Servers compared to new retail from HPE.
When Intelligent Servers was founded (as Intelligent Brokerage) over ten years ago, G6 was the latest and greatest HPE hardware. Overtime we have seen many different types of hardware come and go, and a few months ago, we were fortunate enough to ship our first Synergy solution.
Being available on the market for over three years, we are starting to see HPE Synergy solutions flood into the refurbished market.... and of course, there is no better storage solution to pair it with than 3PAR!
A global telecoms company approached Intelligent Servers looking to upgrade their current infrastructure to a Synergy and 3PAR configuration for their data centre in Spain.
The Synergy configuration included the Synergy 12000 Frame and four Synergy 480 Gen10 Blade Servers, each configured with dual Intel Xeon Gold 6152 CPUs, 128GB of Memory, 600GB of Storage, Network Adapters, HBAs and Controllers. The Synergy was paired with 1x HPE 3PAR 8450 23TB All-Flash SAN Storage Array that has 2x additional HPE 3PAR 8000 Range SFF Disk Enclosures to enable “Cage Redundancy”.
The company was initially being pushed by HPE directly to buy new retail HPE Synergy with a HPE Primera SAN Storage Array, but the customer choose refurbished through IntelligentServers.co.uk, enabling them to spend the remainder of their budget on other essential infrastructure upgrades which they wouldn’t have been able to do if they bought new from HPE.
Leading European Poker Champion configures 6.1TB of RAM ♠️
Location: London, United Kingdom
Hardware: HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 Rack Servers
Budget: £40,000
Key selling points: The technical knowledge of our account managers meant the client was able to say what he wanted to achieve, and our technical experts designed an IT solution specific to his exact requirements.
Earlier this year, we shipped a HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 4U Rack Server to one of the best poker players in Europe. Requiring something more powerful than his current Workstation, the poker player was looking for significantly more RAM and CPUs with higher cores to slash the time it takes to solve solver trees.
The Server was configured with 96x 64GB DDR4 Memory Modules for a massive 6.1TB of RAM and four Intel Xeon E7 processors supporting up to 96-cores. The Server is being used to support poker solver software including Monker and Pio, to find optimal plays in online poker games.
Intelligent Servers is the only supplier able to source Gen10 Blades for Bank 🏫
Location: South Africa
Hardware: HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen10 Blade Servers
Budget: £65,000
Key selling points: Ability to source IT equipment no longer available from the manufacturer.
Cost savings are not the only reasons businesses choose refurbished… Intelligent Servers extensive stock holding really pulled through for one South African bank! We were able to source 10x BL460c Gen10 Blades for the bank, which have become increasingly difficult to come by since HPE switched to Synergy.
After contacting dozens of suppliers, Intelligent Servers was the only supplier able to source the Blades, which will seamlessly integrate into their data centre (not even Hewlett Packard Enterprises were able to source the hardware!). The ability to source IT equipment no longer available from the manufacturer is yet another reason why refurbished hardware can be a huge benefit for small businesses and billion pound enterprises alike.
The icing on the cake of this order was that the bank invited Intelligent Servers to the invitation only FSQS certification programme, which we passed with flying colours. This now means other banks and financial services can buy from Intelligent Servers with fewer hurdles to jump through due to strict measures in place on financial service suppliers.
Our largest ever single sale 🚀
Location: Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
Hardware: HPE 3PAR StorServ and HPE BL460c Gen8 Blade Servers
Budget: £500,000
Key selling points: Good experience with Intelligent Servers on numerous occasions led to this multi-million-pound business choosing Intelligent Servers for their largest IT projects.
We were proud to complete our biggest ever single sale in the middle of the pandemic when a repeat business customer came back to us to buy more refurbished HPE 3PAR 7000's and refurbished HPE BLc7000’s configured with HPE BL460c Gen8 Blade Servers.
The order total was just under £500k! If the customer decided to buy new retail HPE Gen10 and HPE 3PAR 8000 Series from HPE, they would have forked out a whopping £4.7millon. That’s a saving of £4.2millon!!
The customer that runs their own private cloud infrastructure was so pleased with their initial purchase of four refurbished HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400c Storage Arrays and two refurbished HP BLc7000 Blade Enclosures; they decided to come back for more! But this time, it was five HPE 3PAR 7450c All-Flash Arrays configured with over 1,193TB (1.19Petabytes) using HPE 3PAR MLC 1.92TB SSD Drives and six HPE C7000 Blade Enclosures built with 96 fully configured HPE BL460c Gen8 Blade Servers including 49TB of RAM!
All of the hardware is covered by our 3 year hardware replacement warranty and 3 year remote setup and support services, free of charge! This and many other examples prove that it’s not just businesses with small IT budgets that see the benefits of refurbished. Companies that spend millions of pounds on IT a year also love refurb!
Porn site requires hardware for growing members 🍆
Location: Netherlands
Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380p and DL360p Gen8 Rack Servers, Cisco Switches
Budget: £60,000
Key selling points: Three year warranty including support, able to ship in a ready to deploy condition
Although it's been all doom and gloom in the headlines, there are some industries that have benefited from the nationwide lockdown... It's no surprise that one porn website required lots of new servers this year.
The popular website, which you may or may not be familiar with, has ordered 15 fully configured HP ProLiant DL380p and DL360p Gen8 Rack Servers along with some Cisco Switches. The main reasons the IT manager chose to work with Intelligent Servers is due to our three year warranty including remote setup and support. Configuring all the hardware to their specifications, testing and shipping in a ready to deploy condition also saved him a lot of time when deploying the equipment.
The website assured us that they will require more hardware in the future to accommodate their growing members.
If you would like to join over 5,000 happy customers from over 100 countries who have saved millions of pounds on their IT hardware, please get in touch on 01423 223430, email sales@intelligentservers.co.uk or speak to an agent on live chat.
Intelligent Servers is one of Europe’s leading refurbished Server, Storage, Networking and Component resellers, specialising in HPE, Dell and Cisco. All hardware comes with a three year warranty including remote setup and support.