A big part of what's pushing the mini use in the datacenter is that pretty much everybody will give you a cheaper colo deal with less restrictions than a 1u. Be

A big part of what's pushing the mini use in the datacenter is that pretty much everybody will give you a cheaper colo deal with less restrictions than a 1u. Because the mini lacks stuff like raid, multiple nics, ipmi etc. the typical customer can be relied on to have a pretty idle server. The mobile parts help, but if you filled one of those high density mini racks and used them as compute servers or cloud hosts or something your rack would melt just as fast as any cpu heavy stack of 1us. But with almost everyone just running a hobby website, directory server or mdm you can fit 10 or 15 of those things into to the power budget of a 1u or 2u cdn edge box. You can see the artifacts in a lot of their price lists. Dedicated colo? Sure, $35. Oh you want a managed firewall in front of it? that'll be $50 extra. Want some space on our fault tolerant SAN? No problem, $200. I bet it's a great way for a hosting company to get some use out of cages in the popular dc's that can't sell any more power.