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Most people who visit HPE’s Technology Renewal Centre (TRC) are there for business. They’re potential customers, either to sell on their end-of-life IT equipment or buy the reconditioned kit for themselves. But if you’re thinking Computer Exchange for businesses, think again: this is industrial scale work involving 240,000 square feet and around 200 workers.
I wasn’t visiting the TRC to buy or to sell. I was part of an unusual group on a one-off tour; a mix of journalists, analysts and even Matt Harris, HPE’s Managing Director of UK, Ireland and Middle East and Africa.
Matt’s presence in itself indicates how important this centre is to HPE. But it wasn’t the only indication: there was also the consignment of HPE ProLiant servers freshly wrapped up, ready for delivery to France – the final delivery in an order that totalled 500. That, you suspect, would have cost some serious cash.
There’s also a sustainability side to all this. We reported in May on how Liverpool John Moores University is tackling e-waste through HPE’s circular IT program. Well, this is where the magic happens.
This is a fair question. One I indirectly posed to Matt Harris when I asked him, in some might call a blunt manner, why he was there. I wasn’t recording at the time, so don’t have his exact words, but he made one key point that this is a growing and growingly important part of HPE’s portfolio.
In particular, it’s a key part of the HPE Financial Services division. A fact hammered home by the fact that its worldwide President & CEO, Maeve Culloty, was also on our tour. With ever-growing pressure on cashflow, purse holders are looking for ways to make the most of every penny they invest: HPE Financial Services currently offers what it calls HPE 90/9 Advantage, a loan where you don’t pay anything for the first 90 days followed by nine months at 1%.
“The macroeconomics [are] changing,” she said, pointing to rising inflation rates around the world. “So what’s happening for our customers is they’ve got to solve their IT requirements. They’ve got to figure out how it gets financed. And where customers were previously buying with cash, they’re now open to understanding what financing options look like.”
In addition, there’s a chronic shortage of key components such as RAM and storage. This reduces supply at the same time that people are looking to invest in technology – AI in particular.
“So at HPE, we’ve got the perfect trifecta,” said Culloty. “We can help with the new [technology]. We’ve got financing with HPE Financial Services. And we’ve also got the ability to maximise the underlying value of the infrastructure that they have in place today.”
In many cases, that will include extracting value from existing infrastructure, otherwise known as IT asset disposal or ITAD. Which brings us back to why such senior HPE executives joined us for this tour.
To give some idea of scale, let me hit you with some numbers:
As I said at the top, this is not like your average Computer Exchange.
By reclaiming all these assets, both in Erskine and a similar facility in Arizona, Maeve Culloty said that HPE FS hands over around $1.25 million per day to its customers. Money they can then re-invest into its new infrastructure.
More stats: 60% of the data centre assets the TRC handles are HPE branded. And around 70% of the workplace assets (think laptops and monitors) are HP branded. All the rest are a mix of brands: I saw Apple, Fujitsu, Lenovo and Sun Microsystems kit being processed.
While the building in Erskine is now the HPE Technology Renewal Centre, it started life in 1989 as a factory for making Compaq PCs. At one point said Jackie Rafferty, TRC Operations Manager, it was churning out around 7,000 PCs every 12 hours. “We were the most effective PC manufacturer per square foot,” he said, with more than a hint of pride. This was when the Silicon Glen was in its pomp, before Ireland stole its wafer-decorated crown.
The building switched to its current role almost 16 years ago. Rafferty said that the number of staff used to be higher, but it now handles more assets than ever. This is thanks in part to a customised version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 that acts as an ERP for every component of every asset – be that a desktop PC or a supercomputer. The centre processed one of the latter last year.
First, they need to work out what components don’t have a value. They’re delivered on palettes by customers and partners, and things like cables simply don’t have a market and must be recycled. Although David Connell, Engineering Manager of the TRC, said they once received a China dog ornament – “the kind you might have found at the bottom of your aunt’s stairs”.
Each pallet has a unique identifier, which means that every asset’s owner is known and in the ERP from the start. Once the pallet has been unloaded and the chaff separated from the wheat, the individual assets are themselves tagged and entered into the system.
At this point the TRC can give the sender an audit report, because they may not know exactly what they sent.
The next step is the simple act of cleaning. For example, we saw technicians take a laptop, wipe its screen and keyboard before removing the now-redundant stickers from all surfaces. While most organisations will have wiped computers’ SSDs and hard disks, HPE will use software to wipe it clean as well.
Despite the effectiveness of such electronic wipes, some customers will insist that the TRC destroys the disks too. Something it will do, reluctantly, with Rafferty showing the desiccated results in the photo below.
Another problem is BIOS locks, because customers haven’t completed decommissioning. “This is the business’s responsibility under GDPR,” explained Connell.
Now its time for the auditors to do their work. They will examine every asset and assess which components look like they’re reusable. For example, a network module, memory stick or processor. Each component is then entered into the system and tagged.
It’s painstaking work but as we’ve already seen the rewards are tangible.
At this point, no-one has any idea which components work and which don’t. So it’s time to put them through a set of diagnostic tests – ones that mirror the factory tests at the original time of manufacture – to determine if they’re in good enough condition to be reused.
Assembled laptops, desktop PCs and servers are also put through the same kind of stability testing as a new system. This includes power cycling on and off and stress testing, and if the sound of the fans I was standing next to whilst David Connell talked about this are any indication those tests are fierce.
If a component fails, such as an SSD in a laptop, then they will source a new one from their own stock or from a broker.
Once assets have gone through this whole cycle, from arriving on a pallet to being tested, they are given that most important thing: a value. “We track the asset physically, but also financially,” said Connell of products that go through the process we’ve detailed in this article. “That really is the power of the transformation that we did in our ERP system.”
At this point, the process has come to an end: what came into the TRC as an asset of questionable value has either been refurbished and made ready to sell, stripped of any valuable components, or sent for recycling. (And sent to HPE’s own recycling centre, by the way, rather than offloading this task to a third party.)
The originating company has a full list of what it sent and a detailed breakdown of what everything is worth. It’s IT asset disposition (ITAD) made easy.
As we mentioned above, roughly 8,000 assets arrive into TRC Erskine each day and roughly 8,000 are sold. But they will need to be stored in the meantime, which is where the huge storage bays that typically contain around 200,000 assets – a mix of assembled products and components – come into play.
Once sold, or leased, they need to be packaged up. This is one area where HPE Financials has upped its game in recent years, moving from barely branded brown boxes to the far more professional black boxes you see below.
It has also moved to a starch-based cushioning rather than cardboard or the dreaded plastic. The starch dissolves in water, Rafferty explained, so no potential for landfill there.
To end, I asked Matt Harris if he had a simple message to organisation that are sitting on potentially valuable inventory, whether workspace or data centre.
“That there is so much unlocked potential in the infrastructure that you already have, either either from a utilisation perspective or a reutilisation of that asset,” he said. “In a world where economically everything is becoming more expensive, this becomes a board-level, serious agenda item that people need to consider.”
