Hey r/homelab ,

I just stumbled across what looks like an absolute goldmine of a government data center liquidation auction in India.

Unfortunately, I found it after the auction had already closed, so I completely missed the chance to bid. 😭

It was a Regional Passport Office / Ministry of External Affairs data center liquidation, and the reserve price was surprisingly low. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for similar auctions in the future.

The interesting (and slightly crazy) part was that it was an all-or-nothing bulk lot. So you'd have to take everything — including the heavy infrastructure/scrap — rather than just picking out the servers you wanted.

Some of the hardware listed:

4× Lenovo ThinkSystem SR550

5× Dell PowerEdge R630

2× HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9

80+ IBM x-Series systems (x3650/x3550)

FortiGate 800D & Check Point 5600 firewalls

Hitachi G200/G400 SANs

EMC storage arrays

30+ server/network racks

If I'd managed to get the lot, I'd probably have kept a couple of the R630s/SR550s…