Ask HN: Do You Buy Servers?
Dunno if this is what you are looking for.... but I&#x27;ve specified hundreds of high end servers (all HP) in very large banks onprem and in colo in 4 geos.<p>- often you are limited to &quot;off the shelf&quot; approved subsets of hardware+rhel configurations that have been tested by a centralised team. These teams rarely have a clue about what they are doing, are highly inflexible and their specs very out of date.<p>- with colo there has been more flexibility as these are bought for the bank by a 3rd party<p>- very large number of NICs needed for bonding + seperate physical network for client connectivity&#x2F;internal connectivity&#x2F;exchange connectivity.<p>- driven by business requirements from whatever trading area<p>- their own technology team<p>- then massive multilayer procurement sign off process that can take 6+ months<p>- the available hardware might change or increment during this process requiring a reset if the appetite exists<p>- usually not bought direct from manufacturer but a &quot;pre approved&quot; vendor who passes bank procurement onboarding procedures<p>- servers all have iLo for mgmt&#x2F;failure etc - usually requires interaction with an official systems team via internal bank ticketing&#x2F;helpdesk system<p>- colo you open tickets with e.g. Eqinix to receive the hardware and have it put in your cage or whatever pending weekend install by bank or 3rd party team who hook them up to switches as per agreed design with network+systems and business tech team<p>- often when live there are 2&#x2F;3 different teams monitoring the hosts 24&#x2F;7 using various tools<p>prob left out a load of stuff.