Am I right to guess that neither your dev nor prod machines ran IA-64? If so that's not ideal, but beggars can't be choosers & a spare box from the infra team available right now is better than getting a box built to meet your exact specs available after the usual multi-quarter internal lead time.

Superficially it sounds a little crazy, but it's probably a lot less crazy than far more mainstream antipatterns (e.g. 'lets have our CI download all the dependencies from npm over the internet each time the build runs')!

Did running the unit tests on IA-64 ever flush out genuine issues that were 'working by accident' on x86?