Yeah... I am used to even higher grade than that... of course, way more pricier... but pays on the long run, but needs bigger contracts. HP is not bad, but I can't comment on that right now, since I represent my company that has HPC equipment and also that's totally different from normal business gear.
IBM was OKish... but supper expensive.
I once tried the rogue way with things like ASUS and direct to Supermicro, but I was kind of divided between features and price.
AMD gear is turning out to be a very great thing to go for either way. Especially on the bandwidth arena, both to memory or PCIe.
Server side things... like you mentioned, I think the best if for you guys to go kubernetes or OpenStack in general and live with the consequences of needing a bootstrapping machine to control the provisioned environment. Just like we do on HPC.
Either way, would have a long discussion with a !BEER =)