We needed one or two more cabinets. Fast.
Not forever. Month to month if possible.
That was the request I sent to our provider.
“Do you guys have month x month cabinets for rent or anything on a short basis?”
We needed to add one or two, and we wanted to put something together quickly. If the person I asked was not the right contact, I wanted to know who else could help.
The first response I needed was availability. Is there short-term space here? If not, who else should I call?
Physical capacity arrives in chunks. Even when the need is temporary, the available unit is still a cabinet. At that point, the number we needed was one or two.
The month-to-month part mattered because I was explicitly asking for something short. The speed mattered because the need was already present. Beyond that, I had not described the project or committed us to a solution.
This was not the data-center strategy. It was a capacity request sent to someone who might have space.
If the answer was yes, there would be more questions about the actual setup. If the answer was no, I wanted the referral quickly enough to keep looking somewhere else. The request stayed focused on the thing the provider could answer immediately.
Do you have it? If not, who should I ask?
The request went out. I still needed the reply before I could say where the additional cabinets would come from.
Everything else depended on that answer.