4 ms·

Oxide is an HN darling. I have never seen anything even close to negative about them here. I hope someone writes a case-study about this. It seems to be a mix o

Oxide is an HN darling. I have never seen anything even close to negative about them here. I hope someone writes a case-study about this. It seems to be a mix of the charisma of the team/founders and their product that makes everyone love them. I would put Wireguard/Tailscale in the same category as well.

azinman2 3y ago
But are people buying their machines?
- LoganDark 3y ago
  no, companies are :)
- intvocoder 3y ago
  They only started shipping this month... so, jury's out?
- monocasa 3y ago
  They recently shipped their first rack IIRC.
- newsclues 3y ago
  Given they shipped their first machine, it seems so.
HL33tibCe7 3y ago
fly.io too, although the scales have fallen from the eyes of HN to some extent after their repeated outages
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
owenmarshall 3y ago
> I would put Wireguard/Tailscale in the same category as well. Sometimes the hype exists for a good reason - as a paying enterprise Tailscale customer, I’ll fight you if you ever suggest I have to staff people to admin an IPsec or SSL-based VPN again.
Tuna-Fish 3y ago
Here's the big negative things I can come up with quickly: 1. It's not clear the market case closes, because while there are customers who would greatly benefit from their systems, those same customers are also very averse to change, meaning that most of them will probably sit out for the first few generations to see if they have staying power. If everyone does that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 2. ... but this would have been fine, a few years ago. It's not fine in the current market situation, where there is much less easy money looking for a place to go. I sure hope they are sitting on a long runway. 3. Speaking of, they are very late in their execution. A SM4 platform that only shipped in 2023 is not great. I really hope they are far along on their SP5 development. (... But this also dampens current sales. I bet a lot of potential customers are thinking that a SP5 Oxide Rack seems a much more appealing than a SP4 one, so why not wait?) But the reason they are not discussed that much is that people who understand the market are all really, really hoping that they pull it off. Because the current situation in server hardware is dire. In every thread people who don't know much about servers ask why not get a similar system from Dell or Supermicro or whoever. The answer is that the commodity servers are pieces of shit that requires significant local engineering resources to manage. Software quality of firmware is generally horrendous, and when this is pointed out to the vendors, their answer is that they know, but everyone else is just as bad, wontfix. A significant draw of the cloud is that all that pain goes away, because the hyperscalers realized how shit everything was and fixed it in their systems. It just never trickled down to the market below them.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  There are just very few people regularly buy 500k-1M in Server hardware and have a good understanding of the market and the finances involved in the alternative.
panick21_ 3y ago
It partly because they have a good podcast that is perfectly aligned with what many people on HN like. Other then that, the code is open source. They also help sponsor both Rust and OpenFireware conferences.

azinman2 3y ago

But are people buying their machines?

LoganDark 3y ago
no, companies are :)
intvocoder 3y ago
They only started shipping this month... so, jury's out?
monocasa 3y ago
They recently shipped their first rack IIRC.
newsclues 3y ago
Given they shipped their first machine, it seems so.

HL33tibCe7 3y ago

fly.io too, although the scales have fallen from the eyes of HN to some extent after their repeated outages

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

owenmarshall 3y ago

> I would put Wireguard/Tailscale in the same category as well. Sometimes the hype exists for a good reason - as a paying enterprise Tailscale customer, I’ll fight you if you ever suggest I have to staff people to admin an IPsec or SSL-based VPN again.

Tuna-Fish 3y ago

Here's the big negative things I can come up with quickly: 1. It's not clear the market case closes, because while there are customers who would greatly benefit from their systems, those same customers are also very averse to change, meaning that most of them will probably sit out for the first few generations to see if they have staying power. If everyone does that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 2. ... but this would have been fine, a few years ago. It's not fine in the current market situation, where there is much less easy money looking for a place to go. I sure hope they are sitting on a long runway. 3. Speaking of, they are very late in their execution. A SM4 platform that only shipped in 2023 is not great. I really hope they are far along on their SP5 development. (... But this also dampens current sales. I bet a lot of potential customers are thinking that a SP5 Oxide Rack seems a much more appealing than a SP4 one, so why not wait?) But the reason they are not discussed that much is that people who understand the market are all really, really hoping that they pull it off. Because the current situation in server hardware is dire. In every thread people who don't know much about servers ask why not get a similar system from Dell or Supermicro or whoever. The answer is that the commodity servers are pieces of shit that requires significant local engineering resources to manage. Software quality of firmware is generally horrendous, and when this is pointed out to the vendors, their answer is that they know, but everyone else is just as bad, wontfix. A significant draw of the cloud is that all that pain goes away, because the hyperscalers realized how shit everything was and fixed it in their systems. It just never trickled down to the market below them.

panick21_ 3y ago
There are just very few people regularly buy 500k-1M in Server hardware and have a good understanding of the market and the finances involved in the alternative.

panick21_ 3y ago

It partly because they have a good podcast that is perfectly aligned with what many people on HN like. Other then that, the code is open source. They also help sponsor both Rust and OpenFireware conferences.