We have about 30 old tower computers at work that have been decommissioned for one reason or another. They are a mix of old servers and desktops. I'd like to get rid of nearly all of them to prevent management from thinking "we can just use one of those boxes".
In the 1.5 years I've worked here we have
- refurbished and recommissioned (with new parts)
- 1 back to production
- 1 to testing environment / production reserve
- cannibalised none of them for parts
- added at least 9 more to the pile
Admittedly as far as anyone is aware, they work, or at least most of them do.
They are just taking up space, collecting dust, and getting slower (compared to new machines). Some of the machines were decommissioned because they were too slow, and now after 1.5 years of collecting dust, does management expect them to be able to do anything new? Most of them would fail to sell on ebay for even $50. Though it does look like most of them just pass the minimum spec the local charities will accept.
My manager is talking about setting up a KVM hypervisor environment and his first suggestions were boxes that turned out to have a Xeon Nocona (32bit and no VT-x) and a Pentium 4 Prescott (64bit and no VT-x), both released in 2005. Many of the extremely low power Intel Atom CPU's are faster.
How do you convince management to get rid of them before even charities won't accept them?