The Hardware Hustle

Is it just me or is there some kind of conspiracy in the air right now?  In the last few weeks pretty much every IT news and online resource I use has carried an article on the dangers of aging hardware.  I attended a shin-dig just this Thursday where one speaker managed to get a reference in to the topic as well despite it not being on the agenda.  However as he was from one of the hardware companies I suspect it’s always on his agenda.

Is this just a chance confluence of events?  Or is the hardware industry trying to drum up trade using scare tactics?  You gotta know which one I favour.

You see I am employed to get a job done, and to get it done at the lowest overall cost to the company who employ me as I can.  We are not a charitable foundation established to keep Hewlett Packard or Dell sales bonuses high for Christmas so little Timmy can have an iPad.  We are here to align the business need to the available technology.  And if, in hardware terms, that means 5 year old technology then that is just what I will use.

Let’s talk about the environment.  I like “sustainable ICT”.  I follow the mantra of all the Rs.  (or is that a mantra that’s all a load of arse?  I do struggle to remember these days)

Reuse

Repair

Repurpose

Refurbish

Recycle

Replace

But it makes economic sense as well.  I am particularly fond of HP’s DC7600.  It’s a desktop PC from maybe 4 years ago.  I own a couple of hundred of them.  And I bought maybe 50 more of them off eBay for £70 a pop.  They are the backbone of my workforce PCs.  They slog on and they do the job.  They require no hardware maintenance because (and I hate to sound like I am the HP fanboi here) HP built them well, very well.  We bought cheap RAM, and didn’t scrimp on CPU when we bought them and guess what?  They run Vista and W7 just fine.  We don’t permit local storage of data and our principal business applications are web delivered (hey I can maybe pass this off as private cloud and look tech-sexy?) so the tiny hard drives common to desktops 4, 5, 6 years ago work fine for me.  They aren’t great if you have users who need a power user type machine or workstation so for those users we give them a new (or at least newer) PC.  Job done.  Seriously, we have had one pop a fan, and one fail a HDD, and that’s about the lot.

I hear people bleating about difficulty of managing old PCs.  Well, you are doing it wrong then.  We got off XP and W2K because W2K is old and sucks and XP does not enable a lot of the ace features in Windows Server 2008.  We had a business case, we went for it. Also a nice thing is that “longhorn” era OS are hardware agnostic.  One image to rule them all my precious.  And get your patching, updates, inventory management up to scratch and you can manage an estate of disparate hardware of various vintage and it’s no real bother.  There are some great tools from Microsoft to help you do this, as well as a bunch from freeware and cheap third parties. 

I hear further bleating (or scaremongering) about the fact that these old PCs are terribly insecure.  This is on the assumption that you are running a mish-mash of badly patched semi-obsolete OS platforms and so forth.  There is no reason you can’t run a decent OS on an old PC.  The FOSS camp will encourage you to run some Red Hat or Ubuntu estate, carefully crafted to maximise performance but I don’t think you get the easy management that way.  Prove me wrong and I’ll become a convert.  Pick the OS which works for your shop.  Avoid bloaty security products and stick to the ones which do what needs to be done and you’ll have the resources to run a secure network on old kit.  Also the older PCs won’t have come with DVD writers and so forth as default, non-delete options so you are at a lower risk of data theft.  Use W7/WS2008R2 group policy to manage data via USB and you are golden.  Older kit with a CD ROM only is actually more secure!

Energy use is often cited as a reason to replace your old kit.  While I am committed to every possible avenue to reduce energy consumption in my business (especially in our data centre where power = heat = more air conditioning = more expense = more power used = power circuit upgrades = more expense etc.) I am unconvinced by the argument that I need to rip and replace to save a fortune on PC desktop power consumption.  I have looked at people presenting figures on this in the past and on each occasion I found the numbers to be flawed or just plain wrong.  The last one I looked at actually worked back to say that our PCs used 40% more power than the whole power consumption of our company in total.  Beware the “assumptions” people build into these proposals.  If you have a nice modern OS and a nice modern server OS then you can manage Windows Power Management by group policy, and do it moderately well.  The newer the combo of client and server the better the results seem to be but this is still an area where the real world application falls short of the advertising.  Good power management is important for good patching.  Wake on LAN has to work.

This whole thing is starting to be less relevant because of the cloud.  Some CIO of note who’s name and company I immediately forgot says that Windows 7 will be the last mass OS deployment. In the same way that many (including Bill Gates interestingly enough) predict that Blue Ray will be the last disc based distribution format.  Certainly the variety of devices upon which corporate data is being accessed is broadening daily.  And I have to ask if you can pick up email and review a word document on a 600Mhz processer mobile phone why do you suddenly need 4 GB RAM and a 4 GHz processor to do the same job on a PC?

The workforce we manage tomorrow will be working in very different ways, or they will be Chinese. I doubt very much that the PC platform and the traditional server hardware will be what we are talking about with any great relevance, not in the mainstream of IT services anyway.  This push for hardware sales is possibly a death throw of an old industry.  Look how the big PC manufacturers are repositioning themselves as “business services” and cloud providers and the like.  Look how IBM, HP, Dell and the like have been reshaping their businesses.  I think that probably tells you as much about the importance of the old fashioned hardware refresh as does my ramblings...

This is how ecommerce is supposed to work.

I use a company called Rock Auto LLC who is based in some far off part of the USA.  I use them because it’s quicker and easier and often cheaper to deal with them than it is to deal with a local supplier here in the UK.  A couple of years ago I’d never heard of them, but now they are on my MVP list.  Why?  Because I appreciate the fact they have ecommerce down right.  Let’s take a look at the Rock Auto customer experience and you’ll see why I am impressed.

It'll never go back together again...

The website is not flashy, it’s not gimmicky. It gets straight down to business.  It’s easy to look at and easy to work out where you go to get what you want.  It’s equally easy to browse or search depending on your preference on how you want to shop.

Once you have drilled down to the parts you need for the car you have you are presented with a range of choices based on the manufacturer of that part, shipping location (vital information for an overseas customer, you want all your bits to ship from the same location to keep the costs down) and you can even see photos of the part, diagrams, spec info, etc.  Everything you need is there to make it easy for you to select the part you need.

You can select prices to be in US Dollars or converted to your local currency (in my case GBP) although they still bill in US Dollars so the price in your currency is indicative rather than precise.

When you get your basket together you select your shipping options. There is a well placed link to explain shipping options in terms of shipping time and cost.  Most shipping options then allow prepayment of the import duty and VAT (taxes for any non-Brits reading this).  This may seem like a small point, and to some an annoyance if they are hoping to sneak parts through the postal system without getting caught for import taxes but it really is a good thing because most carriers charge between £6.95 and £15.00 to process import duty and VAT at this end.  Pre-paying saves this charge.

The basket also allows you to include items “saved” (by entering a quantity of zero) so you can pick them up next time without searching, just go into your basket and change the quantity back to 1, 8, 16, whatever.

There is a live chat option which I have never used but seems a good idea too.  I have no idea what hours it is manned though, so those of us shopping in different time zones may not be able to use this feature as easily.

Once your card is processed and your order is on the system you get useful update emails automatically generated.  They are well thought out too.  For example your confirmation email gives a link back to each item you purchased, order status and separate link takes you directly to the tracking section of the carrier’s website which is shipping your order, right into your actual shipment.  It’s all just so seamless, its “joined up” and it works.

When there is a query on your order, for example I ordered a rotor arm as part of an order and this part was actually out of stock at their warehouse despite having been listed as available on the website, a real person sent me an email and the email contains hyperlinks back to my order and the item in question.  My options are explained and I just have to ping an email back to confirm my choice.  Easy.

None of this is rocket science.  This is just good ecommerce design/practice.  So why do so many other companies utterly PHAIL to offer a good web experience?  I’m afraid I have to name and shame JC Whitney as an utterly frustrating company to try do business with as an international customer due to the convoluted and slow methods of getting international shipping prices and options and placing an order to ship to UK.   Jegs and Summit also need to get demerit points because they charge a surcharge (around $20) to international buyers for no other reason than I guess they just can.  Summit were at least offering online international shipping options although that appeared to have gone last time I used their website. 

I have no idea how big Rock Auto is and how many people it employs.  It does however prove you don’t need to be the size of Amazon to offer a proper online shopping environment which supports your customers and has them coming back time and again as well as telling their friends how good it is and even writing blog posts on the subject...