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Who’s the target buyer of Oxide? I ask genuinely … because I don’t understand who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain? In a wo

Who’s the target buyer of Oxide? I ask genuinely … because I don’t understand who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain? In a world of cloud and dedicated hosted servers (where the users of the server is not the buyer of the server) - who would buy Oxide? It seems like whoever can build the cheapest server wins now. Said differently, cloud has completely changed the value-chain in server buyers

qaq 4y ago
Large enterprises running things on prem. Governments etc.
walrus01 4y ago
ultimately somebody has to buy and own and operate the underlying hardware of the "cloud". obviously AWS, azure, etc do their own hardware procurement and totally bespoke stuff in house. so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers.
- alberth 4y ago
  > so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers. But my understanding Oxide is/will-be priced as a premium over a typical x86 server. It seems unlikely that any hosting company is going to pay a premium just for a bit more convenience. Note: I'm not trying to be a "hater". Just genuinely not understanding the market here.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    you are correct, margins are very thin in hosting company business and the absolute most server performance/number of nodes for the least money is very important. have been on the manufacturing side of this before. bulk x86-64 servers such as you could buy from the vendors you meet at the computex taipei are a big part of it. things along the same general idea as the supermicro that is 2U high and has four discrete nodes in it, but cheaper. long/narrow motherboards with dual socket xeons and other similar stuff... if the price for this is not market competitive with that, or just a bunch of 1U commodity dual socket servers, the only people buying it will be enterprise/specialty end user and not hosting operations.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Does “premium over a typical x86 server” mean a premium over the cheapest servers you can find or a premium over servers sold by (e.g.) Dell?
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    As I understand it, this isn't really a premium product in that sense. What they seem to want to do is give you what a rack (or 2) full of Dell Servers plus the price of a VMWare license would give you. And then you should also save money on maintenance, space, updates, compliance and so on. If the approach to firmware and virtualization means you can have just 1/2 employ less then that's already a huge amount of money.
bri3d 4y ago
Plenty of companies still run hardware. A lot of midsize enterprise and a lot of non-tech/non-software F500. And quite a few won’t move to the cloud - between retailers who don’t want to fund big bad Amazon, hyperactive security departments who (rationally or irrationally) see physical ownership as a necessity, and organizations who have needs which are poorly suited to cloud offerings, it’s not like the datacenter hardware market is completely dead by a long shot. You can proxy this demand by looking at VMWare sales. Anyone running a large amount of baremetal VMWare virtualization has a large on premise deployment and could find managed rack products like Oxide interesting.
jfim 4y ago
People who have to maintain servers in house for various reasons. Maybe they need to run some software that needs to run even if they lose Internet connectivity. Or maybe they're working on secret stuff and their CIO/CTO has decided that this needs to be on prem instead of on the cloud.
mjgerm 4y ago
I think the answer amounts to "anyone who has at least a rack full of Dell/HPE hardware". Dell manages an annual revenue of greater than $20B, so on-prem HW is clearly going strong, regardless of whether or not you think it should be.
im_down_w_otp 4y ago
If Oxide computers had existed when I was working on sorting out the infrastructure for in-country domestic payments at Visa, I'd have lobbied pretty hard to adopt them. Assembling basically the same thing from a bunch of random vendors and terribly integrated software was an infuriating, expensive process that only achieved great results because we invested the time and money into it that I'd have rather budget allocated to writing core payments & settlement applications.
newsclues 4y ago
I hope they target schools so the next generation goes to them to scale up their startups in the future.
oxideexplained 4y ago
Oxide business model explained: You know how you can buy pizza in a cardboard box? What happens if you need to feed a party of ~80 people? You end up getting dozens of pizza boxes delivered. Oxide Pizza delivers all that pizza in a single box.
- beanjuiceII 4y ago
  dang so like all my pizzas are squished?
  - uryga 4y ago
    thats what the rack is for duh
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      Nah, the little plastic table placed in the center of the pizza is keeping the boxes from bowing.
mhh__ 4y ago
For normal businesses cost is important, for smart governments, hedge funds etc. one may have leeway to spend a little more for a better product or better tail risk etc.
chx 4y ago
https://twitter.com/robfig/status/1415695070548959238 https://twitter.com/robfig/status/1415695070548959238
brundolf 4y ago
> who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain? Not my area, but based on other areas: "easier to maintain" can translate directly to "fewer engineer/admin hours consumed", which can translate directly to saved money (or resources that are now freed up to be put toward something more useful)
hestefisk 4y ago
Banks, hedge funds, governments, … anyone who needs a lot of grunt and cannot offload to the cloud. I would say they target the same segment of buyers who go for Oracle’s “engineered” / ExaData / Exalogic machines.

qaq 4y ago

Large enterprises running things on prem. Governments etc.

walrus01 4y ago

ultimately somebody has to buy and own and operate the underlying hardware of the "cloud". obviously AWS, azure, etc do their own hardware procurement and totally bespoke stuff in house. so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers.

alberth 4y ago
> so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers. But my understanding Oxide is/will-be priced as a premium over a typical x86 server. It seems unlikely that any hosting company is going to pay a premium just for a bit more convenience. Note: I'm not trying to be a "hater". Just genuinely not understanding the market here.
- walrus01 4y ago
  you are correct, margins are very thin in hosting company business and the absolute most server performance/number of nodes for the least money is very important. have been on the manufacturing side of this before. bulk x86-64 servers such as you could buy from the vendors you meet at the computex taipei are a big part of it. things along the same general idea as the supermicro that is 2U high and has four discrete nodes in it, but cheaper. long/narrow motherboards with dual socket xeons and other similar stuff... if the price for this is not market competitive with that, or just a bunch of 1U commodity dual socket servers, the only people buying it will be enterprise/specialty end user and not hosting operations.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Does “premium over a typical x86 server” mean a premium over the cheapest servers you can find or a premium over servers sold by (e.g.) Dell?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  As I understand it, this isn't really a premium product in that sense. What they seem to want to do is give you what a rack (or 2) full of Dell Servers plus the price of a VMWare license would give you. And then you should also save money on maintenance, space, updates, compliance and so on. If the approach to firmware and virtualization means you can have just 1/2 employ less then that's already a huge amount of money.

bri3d 4y ago

Plenty of companies still run hardware. A lot of midsize enterprise and a lot of non-tech/non-software F500. And quite a few won’t move to the cloud - between retailers who don’t want to fund big bad Amazon, hyperactive security departments who (rationally or irrationally) see physical ownership as a necessity, and organizations who have needs which are poorly suited to cloud offerings, it’s not like the datacenter hardware market is completely dead by a long shot. You can proxy this demand by looking at VMWare sales. Anyone running a large amount of baremetal VMWare virtualization has a large on premise deployment and could find managed rack products like Oxide interesting.

jfim 4y ago

People who have to maintain servers in house for various reasons. Maybe they need to run some software that needs to run even if they lose Internet connectivity. Or maybe they're working on secret stuff and their CIO/CTO has decided that this needs to be on prem instead of on the cloud.

mjgerm 4y ago

I think the answer amounts to "anyone who has at least a rack full of Dell/HPE hardware". Dell manages an annual revenue of greater than $20B, so on-prem HW is clearly going strong, regardless of whether or not you think it should be.

im_down_w_otp 4y ago

If Oxide computers had existed when I was working on sorting out the infrastructure for in-country domestic payments at Visa, I'd have lobbied pretty hard to adopt them. Assembling basically the same thing from a bunch of random vendors and terribly integrated software was an infuriating, expensive process that only achieved great results because we invested the time and money into it that I'd have rather budget allocated to writing core payments & settlement applications.

newsclues 4y ago

I hope they target schools so the next generation goes to them to scale up their startups in the future.

oxideexplained 4y ago

Oxide business model explained: You know how you can buy pizza in a cardboard box? What happens if you need to feed a party of ~80 people? You end up getting dozens of pizza boxes delivered. Oxide Pizza delivers all that pizza in a single box.

beanjuiceII 4y ago
dang so like all my pizzas are squished?
- uryga 4y ago
  thats what the rack is for duh
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Nah, the little plastic table placed in the center of the pizza is keeping the boxes from bowing.

mhh__ 4y ago

For normal businesses cost is important, for smart governments, hedge funds etc. one may have leeway to spend a little more for a better product or better tail risk etc.

chx 4y ago

https://twitter.com/robfig/status/1415695070548959238 https://twitter.com/robfig/status/1415695070548959238

brundolf 4y ago

> who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain? Not my area, but based on other areas: "easier to maintain" can translate directly to "fewer engineer/admin hours consumed", which can translate directly to saved money (or resources that are now freed up to be put toward something more useful)

hestefisk 4y ago

Banks, hedge funds, governments, … anyone who needs a lot of grunt and cannot offload to the cloud. I would say they target the same segment of buyers who go for Oracle’s “engineered” / ExaData / Exalogic machines.