Comment by qchris
5 days ago
> When I joined Oxide last year, one of the first things I was introduced to was our racklettes; that is, smaller than average racks of four sleds and two switches each. These racklettes can be initialized and run just like a real rack, precisely because they are a real rack. Just not in any form factor it would be economical to sell.
Probably shouldn't have mentioned this publicly ;) Every time an Oxide post comes up, there's people in the comments expressing fervent wishes for just this sort of thing. Now that they know it exists, I imagine the the voices asking to make it available for developers and homelabs will grow even louder.
They mentioned this on the podcast, the problem is that since they're development tools the networking stack is still scaled for a full rack with pretty beefy switches.
Either they need to support a whole second network stack with firmware etc which they don't want to do now, or a racklette would cost way too much and almost nobody would pay the price.
I court see a lot of small businesses wanting one. Or as an addon to their existing Colo setup.
Could also be great for DR sites and smaller remote offices. Power is a big factor in deployments and I can see a smaller little turnkey setup that uses less be very popular
Ha! Even a racklette might be a smidge too big for the homelab. But you know, given these Voxel 'sleds' are ~6GB RAM each, we could probably get a solid mini-PC farm going now....
FTA: At home, I run Voxel labs on a Minisforum MS-A2 mini-PC with a 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX and 96GB RAM.
I have 128 gb dd4 system sitting at home - Emulation (mostly of clients nonsense) has been massively insightful over the last few years. And as a dev, being able to do all my work "not on my laptop" has been a major blessing.
When prices normalize build a couple bulky machines and a have a stack of small and cheap (I have a bunch of 8th gen i5's I got used). You can do a lot (and give yourself room to grow/upgrade) on a pretty tight budget.
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