> Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).

Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.

Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.