> Oh except for the fact that the actual reason they didn't need to hire was because they have outsourced all the hardware management. Actually, they hired som

> Oh except for the fact that the actual reason they didn't need to hire was because they have outsourced all the hardware management. Actually, they hired someone to do the unboxing and then it's over. They didn't say why they did that (maybe their colo's were out of town). Having done it myself it's a case unbox it, plug in the network and power cables. The only remaining step is make the Dell iDRAC IP appear on some VPN, but that VPN is usually what's on the other end of the ethernet cable they plugged in. The iDRAC allows remote control of the BIOS, power and reset switches, and download a boot image (think KVM switch on steroids). (Other manufacturers have other systems that do the same thing. Intel has their management engine for instance.) Once you can connect to the iDRAC's IP Address it may as well be sitting on the floor beside you. Hardware management will happen in 5 years, but until that time it's a case of "if it breaks it's Dell's problem - they go to the site and fix it". In the mean time they have to migrate stuff off that box, but business as usual in a web environment and is done that remotely. If the machine has to be replaced, Dell will re-attach cables. You probably won't need more than that because As for sysadmin'ing, there are lots of tenancy out there like proxymox and vmware. Once that's running it looks like lots of EC2 instances. From there it's like sysadmin'ing any 'nix installation, but without all the proprietary interfaces.