The Secondary Market: A Glossary

Bubble gear: Gear from bankrupt companies.

Distributor overstock: The clearance rack. Equal-to-new gear sold cheap to fulfill quotas.

Equal-to-new: Lightly used hardware.

Floor models, demos or lab gear: Hardware used for testing or demonstration but never deployed.

Off-lease: Hardware resold after a lessee returns it.

Refurbished or refurb: Slightly reworked gear, for example, fans or power supplies replaced before resale.

Remanufactured or remand: Completely reworked hardware, for example, memory or hard drives added.

Remarketed: Refurb or remand gear being resold by the original vendor.

Used: General term for most secondary hardware.

Vintage: Out-of-production hardware such as VAX systems.

White box: Clone equipment. Not truly secondary market but lumped in because of its low price.