The office needed another rack.
I had two opinions about it.
It should be enclosed, and it should be quiet.
The size did not worry me. The cost did not worry me much either. I wanted us to look at a smaller cabinet designed for an office, where people had to sit near the thing and continue thinking.
Servers are loud because data centers do not care about conversation. Offices do.
This was one of the less dramatic parts of company growth. More people and more systems created more local equipment. That equipment needed power, cooling, networking, physical space, and somebody willing to think about how much noise it made.
The infrastructure team had bigger projects moving at the same time. Production traffic was shifting between data centers. Database systems were being cut over. New capacity was being provisioned in another state.
Then there was the office rack.
It still mattered. A technically correct setup that made the workspace miserable was not actually correct. The people around it were part of the system too.
I liked solving these practical problems because the requirements were clear. We did not need a long committee or an elaborate scorecard. Find an enclosed cabinet. Make sure it could hold what we needed. Make sure it would not sound like a jet engine all day.
There were cheaper options. There were larger options. Neither was automatically better.
The right equipment was the one that did the job without becoming everybody else's problem.
So the request stayed short.
Smaller. Enclosed. Quiet.
Please.