[backroomcoder]

I wish that our corporate/internally based hosting service was as good as the best external hosting companies. Therefore, 3-4 days to deliver servers for a new application to be tested on; rather than 3-4 weeks. Not quite an answer to the question but I believe the it department could be alot more effective if it wasn't for process and bureaucracy

[bockris]

I wish for this also but I also know why it can't be that way. The hosting company is in the business of providing a server in a short time period and can afford to keep them on hand. Presumably multiple customers will be asking for them and every server they provision means more revenue.

Your company is probably not in the hosting business and every server that is deployed is an expense and depending on the level of bureaucracy (3-4 weeks in your case, 6-8 weeks in mine) it takes time to make sure this expense is budgeted for, make sure there is room (physical, power, bandwidth, etc) in the data center. I love working for smaller companies because you can cut all that crap out but then smaller companies usually don't have the $ to buy lots of servers.

[nailer]

There's a startup here called VRM that does that, but it's for shared infrastructure only - essentially just a web page over VMware with some 'livecycle' (read: automatic expiry functions) built in.