First thanks so much for the reply! As I said I completely understand this as a starting approach, lots of good reasons for it. I just hope that if you do well and refine things you'll be able to scale down the approach someday. That said:
>The design of the product starts from "what if you're building servers by the rack,"
As you surely know, there are a lot of racks that are smaller than 42/48U ;). I'm not at all opposed to your "build by the rack" approach, I'm just hoping eventually there might be options from you that are 12U or 18U racks, or 42U racks where 6/12/18/24/36U/whatever are your stuff and then there is a bit of extra space for a handful of customer misc racked options that don't fit into your buckets (a couple of racked Macs for example which surprisingly yes can still be a thing).
Anyway, absolutely you'd have to make it that far, absolutely don't want to see you succumb to the classic startup issue of over expansion ahead of scale efficiencies and running out of runway. But what you're doing is exciting, and I guess I just hope to see the benefits get more decentralized someday is all. Right now I have a hodgepodge of OPNsense/Omada/UniFi/TrueNAS/Proxmox(formerly VMware but now that's down the toilet)/etc deployed with various clients and for myself in rural new england, works well overall including when the WAN drops as is fairly regular, but it'd be real helpful to have more refined options someday! So wishing Oxide the best of luck.
You can rent a partial rack space from almost any colocation provider, and they come in units all the way from 1U to 42U. When I did my first startup it was done out of two 1U servers that I rented the space for at about $150 a month including power and bandwidth. My partner and I got access badges, walked in and racked and cabled them ourselves.
>The design of the product starts from "what if you're building servers by the rack,"
As you surely know, there are a lot of racks that are smaller than 42/48U ;). I'm not at all opposed to your "build by the rack" approach, I'm just hoping eventually there might be options from you that are 12U or 18U racks, or 42U racks where 6/12/18/24/36U/whatever are your stuff and then there is a bit of extra space for a handful of customer misc racked options that don't fit into your buckets (a couple of racked Macs for example which surprisingly yes can still be a thing).
Anyway, absolutely you'd have to make it that far, absolutely don't want to see you succumb to the classic startup issue of over expansion ahead of scale efficiencies and running out of runway. But what you're doing is exciting, and I guess I just hope to see the benefits get more decentralized someday is all. Right now I have a hodgepodge of OPNsense/Omada/UniFi/TrueNAS/Proxmox(formerly VMware but now that's down the toilet)/etc deployed with various clients and for myself in rural new england, works well overall including when the WAN drops as is fairly regular, but it'd be real helpful to have more refined options someday! So wishing Oxide the best of luck.