RackRenew, a brand of Sims Lifecycle Services

What is remanufacturing?

Remanufacturing is an industrial process that restores used products to like-new or better-than-new condition through a standardized, rigorous procedure. This page walks you through exactly how a decommissioned hyperscale rack becomes a fully tested, warranted RackRenew system, step by step.

This video is hosted on Vimeo. Accept marketing cookies to watch it here.

Or watch it on Vimeo

Two disciplines, one circular chain

Every RackRenew system starts with a professional decommission by Sims Lifecycle Services and ends as a remanufactured product with new part numbers, new serial numbers and a warranty. These are the two halves of the chain.

Step one

Decommissioning

The formal process of permanently removing equipment from active service: safely shutting down, dismantling and disposing of or repurposing assets. Data destruction, chain of custody and material recovery are managed under one roof at the Sims Lifecycle Services facility.

Step two

Recommissioning

An industrial process that restores used products to like-new or better-than-new condition: full disassembly, component level testing, rebuild to order and complete quality assurance, following one standardized and repeatable procedure.

Remanufactured, refurbished or second hand?

The three terms get mixed up constantly, but they describe very different products. This is what actually separates them.

THE RACKRENEW STANDARD

Remanufactured

Process
Full disassembly, component replacement and testing

Quality
Like-new or better

Warranty
Yes, often OEM-backed

Price
Closer to new, but clearly discounted

Best for
High-value, complex products such as OCP infrastructure

Refurbished

Process
Partial repair and cleaning

Quality
Functional, cosmetically improved

Warranty
Limited or short-term

Price
Moderately discounted

Best for
Consumer electronics and appliances

Second hand

Process
None

Quality
Varies, no guarantees

Warranty
Rarely

Price
Lowest price

Best for
General used goods

Remanufacturing explained

From hyperscale rack to like-new system in nine steps

Every trailer that arrives at the Sims Lifecycle Services facility carries 18 OCP IT racks. From that moment on, every rack, server and component follows one controlled flow: inflow, decommissioning, inspection, design, triage, assembly, full test, final QA and packing. RFID tracking keeps every item accounted for from dock to dock.

STEP 01

Inflow

Hyperscale material is received, checked against the manifest and RFID-tagged for warehouse tracking. Racks are unloaded with specially designed transport equipment, weighed one by one and staged for disassembly, grouped by type.

STEP 02

Decommissioning

Racks move through workstations for staged disassembly. Media is removed and destroyed under a maintained chain of custody, firmware and BIOS chips are destroyed, memory is harvested for reuse and the CPUs reserved for RackRenew servers remain intact.

STEP 03

Inspection

Material reserved for RackRenew is visually inspected: straight sleds, intact latches and labels, no damage to soldered components. Healthy memory modules are tested, reprogrammed, relabeled by a robot and become new SKUs with new serial numbers.

STEP 04

Design

Every RackRenew server is built to order. Memory is added to specification with one model per server, PCIe cards and storage are added as required, and the boot drive is deliberately omitted so automation can take over via PXE.

STEP 05

Triage

Servers are inserted into the triage rack, where software boots over the network and identifies each machine. It collects sensor history, completes a full hardware inventory and updates BIOS, BMC and NIC firmware to the customer specified version.

STEP 06

Assembly

Boot drives go in. For integrated rack orders, servers are mounted at their specified rack position and wired to switches exactly as the customer ordered. Server-only orders move to a production test rack for final stress testing.

STEP 07

Full test

Every server is electronically checked against the manifest. Memory and disks are stress tested, network connections are verified for throughput, and for integrated racks the full topology and inventory are recorded per rack position.

STEP 08

Final QA

Cables are dressed cleanly, servers are labeled and spotless, and a final visual inspection confirms that the build matches the order request exactly. Failed units go back to triage; nothing ships with an open issue.

STEP 09

Pack

Racks are wrapped and crated for transport, loose servers are palletized with protective padding. The system that leaves the dock is tested, documented and ready for deployment.

Security and compliance

Data security is built into every step

  • All media is removed and destroyed under a maintained chain of custody.
  • BMC, TPM and other logic chips that can hold data are securely reduced to dust; flash media is pulverized in specialized destruction equipment.
  • RFID readers track the location of every component through the facility.
  • Anti-static measures, including facility-wide humidity control, protect the electronics at every workstation.

Sims Lifecycle Services production facilities: ISO 9001 · ISO 14001 · ISO 27001 · ISO 45001

The result: like-new systems, a fraction of the footprint

What leaves the facility is not a used server. It is a remanufactured system with new part numbers, new serial numbers, updated firmware and a warranty, built to your order at up to 70% below the acquisition cost of new hardware1 Every remanufactured component carries zero embodied carbon3, while new parts fitted for a configuration carry their original carbon. It also reaches you considerably faster than comparable new equipment2.

Want to see it for yourself? Browse the product range or meet the team at one of our events.

1 Based on RackRenew like-for-like reference comparisons of remanufactured switch, compute node, and storage node configurations against the market price of equivalent new equipment, held on file by RackRenew. Where a comparison involves a model no longer sold new, RackRenew states that in the comparison.

2 Actual lead times depend on final customer configuration, component availability and destination. RackRenew does not guarantee delivery windows on this website.

3 RackRenew assigns the embodied carbon of a component to its first owner, who incurred the manufacturing emissions at original purchase. A component that enters a second service life through remanufacture is counted at zero embodied carbon for the second owner.