Luke, One thing I've been wondering about here is physical access issues, which you haven't really talked about. If you're going to let your customers in a 4am to muck in their 1/4 of a rack, how are you going to limit their access to the *other* 3/4 of the rack? What's to keep that user from plugging into someone else's outlets?
Sure, you can monitor this stuff remotely (which is what everyone is telling you to do anyway...) but you're back in the same boat. You want to micro-manage power, but give them totally open access to their equipment. Do they even sell 1/4 rack doors with individual keys for a good price? And don't you need those doors on the front and back as well? I'm not sure that's going to work. Now maybe (maybe!) if you were renting out physical servers that you bought and provisioned in standard ways, but then let them customize how they like, that would work better. But that's a different market too. I'd almost say that you should cut costs by only allowing physical access during *your* hours, with a bigger up-front fee for 24x7 emergency access if something goes wrong. As you mentioned, letting someone bring in a 10U Sun Enterprise 3500 or some other power beast would be contra-indicated... even if they say "it's cheap, it only cost me $100 on ebay!" but then they blanche at the power cost you then charge them. I dunno... I sorta keep thinking about getting a colo, but then I don't want the hassle for my own server really, esp with dynamic DNS I can host stuff at home if need be. Yes, I can't host my own domain really, and it's not totally reliable, but it does work. I'm just not into paying endless monthly fees for something like this. Basically, you're spending all this time worrying about the power and what happens if someone goes over their limit, and taking out someone else. Instead you should be working to make it as standard and cookie cutter as possible so that you just populate a rack and then sell the bits here and there. Just my few dollars of thoughts... John _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
