Comment by meatmanek

My west-coast employer used to have a few racks of hardware on the east coast. Not a single employee of our company saw the hardware for several years after installation.

The installation itself was handled by the vendor and datacenter. For hard drive failures, our vendor (who provided the warranty) shipped a drive and had a technician drive to the site. We had to 1. tell the datacenter to expect the package and let the tech in, and 2. be online to run the command to blink the lights on the drive that needed replacing and then verify that the drive came online. This 6-company dance (us, vendor, DC, tech, fedex, HDD manufacturer) was more annoying than just terminating an EC2 instance and recreating it (or having EBS handle drive failures behind the scenes) but it wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.