How Long Does It Typically Take to Provision Hardware in Large Corporations?

In my experience, once approvals are in place, it still takes a couple of weeks to get older hardware replaced. For new builds, you could easily be looking at a timeline stretching from placing the order to actually provisioning everything. It’s not uncommon at all for it to take 12 months or more depending on the company size.

In my last job, we could get a whole rack of servers online in just a day or two once they arrived. It really depends on how quickly you can get everything set up. Generally, if I had access to the hardware, we were good to go very quickly. But I get that bigger operations often have different processes that slow things down.

It varies a lot. If the new hardware is crucial for metrics or KPIs, it gets prioritized and things move quickly. If not, you might be waiting for ages before anything happens.

At the company next to us, they often have hundreds of new servers just sitting around for six months. It takes forever to get approvals for them, and by the time they arrive, people are already grumbling about not having them provisioned.

For us, we've been talking about upgrading servers for over a year now, and it's just finally happening. We go through a lot of red tape to justify the purchases, budget for them, and get approvals. It's a nightmare, even in our own datacenter.