ah that's my bad - I wrote this in Dec, we only published in Jan. Obv. missed updating that.

Timeline wise; - we decided to go for it and spend the $$$ in Oct '23 - Convos/planning started ~ Jan '24 - Picked the vendors we wanted by ~ Feb/Mar '24 - Lead-times, etc... meant everything was ready for us to go fit the first gear by mostly ourselves at the start of May (that's the 5mo) - We did the "proper" re-install around June, followed closely by the second site in ~ Sep, around when we started letting our users on it as a open beta - Sep-Dec we just doubled down on refining software/automation and process while building out successive installs

Lead times can be mind numbing. We have certain switches from Arista that have a 3-6 mo leadtime. Servers are build to order, so again 2+ months depending on stock. And obv. holidays mean a lot of stuff shuts down around December.

Sometimes you can swap stuff around to get better lead-times, but then the operational complexity explodes because you have this slightly different component at this one site.

I used to be a EEE, and I thought supply chain there was bad. But with DCs I think it's sometimes worse because you don't directly control some parts of your BoM/supply chain (especially with build-to-order servers).