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I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, hi

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible. Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service? Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Having worked in a variety of related fields, my take on this is that hypervisors like VMware have largely eliminated the need for proprietary hardware with “support” contracts. Just buy 3x the capacity in white boxes and turn off anything that breaks. The problem is that the industry hasn’t noticed this yet. The hyperscalers have, and are printing money as a consequence.
apendleton 3y ago
I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was complaining about why every server in the rack needs a CD drive, which was the norm from Dell), because the kinds of stripped-down, super-efficient hardware designs the hyperscalers were building weren't available to the general public, so this is that: hyperscaler-like technology for people who want to own it themselves. I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.
- bigironcto 3y ago
  Thank you for the response. The problem you described has been solved by the large vendors with Hyper-converged offerings for many years so it sounds like Oxide might be a bit late to the party. I do understand well the rational of running your own servers vs hyperscalers, as well as the repatriation trend but I see Oxide at best as a niche player.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I mean, I don't know anything about this space like you do, I'm just an intrigued observer, but my impression is just: They are going to try to compete with those large vendors. Maybe they won't be able to! Such is life, and indeed is the most common outcome for new ventures. But precious few new ventures have ever entered a market where nobody said some form of "I don't get it, there are already established products in this space, how will this new thing ever get traction?". And yet, lots of new ventures turn out to be competitive with the established players in their market, for one reason and another.
  - liotier 3y ago
    Lack of local support does make them a niche player, but everything starts from a niche and those who believe they don't start from a niche disperse their efforts. So, with the hypothesis that Oxyde is smart, the question therefore is: what niche is Oxyde focusing on ?
  - Voultapher 3y ago
    Genuine question, you mention Hyper-converged, can you point to anything that comes even close to the experience you presumably get from the Oxide offering.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      Although it might be true that the existing vendors don't provide a good experience, I'm still a little miffed that the OP does not even mention the existence of the existing vendors.
chx 3y ago
Maybe you are not. This offering definitely sounds like something for on prem and not a large data center. Basically, if your core competence is hosting stuff you don't need the extra value they provide. But if your core competence is basically anything else and just need more than a single server under the IT guys' desk then this begins to look very exciting.
- bigironcto 3y ago
  You might be right but if a customer won't have the size/scale, it won't value the unique proposition from Oxide. I hope I am wrong because it would be great to see a new player with a fresh perspective in the hardware market.
  - Voultapher 3y ago
    Bryan Cantril claims the cost of running these could be worth it for many small companies, and if you compare it to EC2 costs for running let's say a CI I find that easy to believe. Maybe it won't be cheaper than Hetzner and co. but that's not what they are competing against on a product level.
- itomato 3y ago
  If you could drop ship a rack of gear to the Colo before, with the puny compute and bandwidth potential in that number of Rack Units, didn’t it just become massively more appealing?
soulofmischief 3y ago
I wonder if they aim to target small operations and startups initially.
chubot 3y ago
You’re writing like the status quo is a law of nature. At best it’s been that way for a decade or two How many times has computing hardware changed in response to the economics of the parts and the economics of the businesses buying hardware? There are downsides to new models, but money solves a lot of problems So I don’t know about Oxide in particular, but it seems short sighted to bet on stagnation Also Oxide is doing what Google did 20 years ago, and Facebook open sourced ~10 years ago, so it’s not exactly unproven
qaq 3y ago
They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. It's one thing to be left holding the bag when a SaaS startup goes under, but when you just spent millions on gear that is now completely unsupported... eek. I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. If you're working for a megacorp nothing tends to happen quickly, so there will be a slow roll-out over a multi-year period as old hardware gets phased out and new hardware is brought in for a refresh. If there's a hiccup at any point they'll simply keep the previously purchased stuff running and start a new roll-out with another vendor next fiscal. > I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space. 1. They're just starting out. 2. Some of their customers want to be (or start-out initially) discreet: > Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months. * https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-unveils-the-world-s-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-un...
  - guhidalg 3y ago
    F100 waste so many millions already on projects that never see the light of day, why couldn't they throw money at Oxide and see if it works better than their AWS contract?
    - cdchn 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
strgcmc 3y ago
Essentially this same sentiment, applies to any number of things: - Why would anyone buy the Framework laptop, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Dell, HP, etc. has? - Why would anyone use iPhones in the enterprise/IT world, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Blackberry, Microsoft, etc. has? - Why would anyone use Google Fiber, they don't have nearly the network or support that AT&T, Spectrum, etc. has? - Why would anyone ever use Linux (in enterprise, let's say), compared to the support and adoption that Microsoft/Windows offers? - ... I'm purposely picking different examples with varying degrees of success or adoption. I am not claiming that Oxide will be an instant category-dominating success. I don't think Oxide expects to replace HP/Cisco/Dell/etc. overnight, and I don't think a business has to launch with that ambition from the start, to prove that it's worth launching. But this take is so repetitive as to be bordering on cliche -- I don't know if you're self-aware enough to realize, you are literally just a living embodiment of the "Innovator's Dilemma" right now...
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Your examples are strange. Framework is niche. iPhones do have the pedigree. Google Fiber is barely used. Most folks do use a supported Linux distribution, they don’t roll their own.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    > Framework is niche. "Niche" is not a dirty word. Framework is niche, but if they can make their cost structure work (which I have no idea whether or not they can), that's ok. New products don't need to dominate their market in order to be succesful. (But I do agree that Google Fiber is a bad example / a good example of a new product in an established market not working.)
  - leetrout 3y ago
    > iPhones do have the pedigree Not in 2007-2008 which is equivalent to Oxide today.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
TimTheTinker 3y ago
You may not be aware of the pain that many large, non-software companies currently have on AWS. Gigantic monthly bills (hundreds of thousands per month) coming from subdivisions that aren't capable or motivated to reduce their AWS budget or usage. To the office of the CTO, Oxide's value proposition (buy instead of rent) could be very motivating. "Hey subdivision A, could we buy a few Oxide racks and move your workload there from AWS? It looks like they would have all the storage and compute you need. Yes? Ok, in 36 months we'll pay your current IT department employees a bonus of 50% of whatever it has saved us vs your current AWS budget."
- dewbrite 3y ago
  Having worked somewhere with an AWS spend of $30k/mo on _virtually nothing_, I can attest to this. I think most of it was sales demos that never got cleaned up.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Converting your OpEx to CapEx is not a remedy for sloppy bookkeeping.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      But if it significantly reduces total cost, it could still be a useful bandaid.
- cdchn 3y ago
  Most people who can do this (aren't as entrenched in AWS) end up moving to a cheap VPS provider so that they don't end up having to pay for all the internetworking, facilities, throw redundancy out the window, and then still have to pay the IT burden to heavy-lift all their workloads to this whole new "Oxide" system.
  - omarfarooq 3y ago
    > end up moving to a cheap VPS provider Like which?
Nilithus 3y ago
I guess there must be a largish market for this since AWS introduced Outpost to provide the "cloud" to onprem industries. I feel like this is competing with that market. Since many of those use cases probably already run extensive on-prem infrastructure this could appeal to them. AWS outpost talks about industries like healthcare, telecom, media and entertainment, manufacturing, or highly regulated spaces like financial services. I've heard of media companies that process through things like IMAX cameras that have just tons of TB's of data sometimes just for 5 minutes worth of footage. That would simply be too cost prohibitive - in bandwidth alone - to try and move around in the cloud and you don't want to have to wait for things like AWS snowball or whatever. While I think the space is "niche" those niche spaces are not small. Big companies with big budgets.
panick21_ 3y ago
I think they are a competitor to the 'HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged)' part of this. They basically saying 'we will do it better'. Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. > Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. I guess that a risk they are willing to take. Some costumers might wait for a few years until they see Oxide being big enough. Other costumers might be sick of HP/Dell and might take a Risk on a smaller company. Since they seem to have some costumers, some organizations are willing to take the risk to get away from Dell and friends. So I think you are the target audience but you are not willing to risk it until they are larger and less likely to fail and they have a good story in regards to support. I assume they have a support story of some kind, no idea what it is 'Contact Sales' .... In terms of 'trusting they will continue exists' all they can do is survive for a few years until they are pretty established, then more people will be willing buy their product. And hopefully in that time their existing costumers rave about how amazing the product is. Lets hope they don't go bust because all potential costumers are just waiting. Then again, you can't anybody for not buying from a startup.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. As someone who has dealt with mostly Debian and Ubuntu in recent years, every time I had to deal with even small numbers of RHEL licenses I often asked myself "Why do put up with this?" (I know why, but still… such overhead.)
- johncowan 3y ago
  I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    I think that ship has sailed in the 90s. From the 80s to the 90s IBM dropped like 50% of the people that worked there and lots of companies were moving away from mainframes in droves. I'm sure some people got fired for sticking to mainframes to long and wasting money. And likely some companies went bust in the late 90s for having a IT infrastructure based on IBM Mainframes. That's mostly speculation but it seems like it has to be true.
itomato 3y ago
What about from an Integrator or VAR? Would you buy it then?
cdchn 3y ago
I really wonder what their mental image of a product market fit is. They're undeniably doing some cool stuff but myself and it seems like everybody else has to do some serious mental gymnastics to figure out who they sell this to and what needs it fulfills or niches it can fit into.
carapace 3y ago
> Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service? Forgive me for being naive, but that sounds like a great way to differentiate their offering. E.g. the famous Maytag Repairman, who sits at his desk doing nothing because Maytag washers are so reliable that he has nothing to do. > In a time in which the laundry appliances of major manufacturers had reached maturity, differing mostly in minor details, the campaign was designed to remind consumers of the perceived added value in Maytag products derived from the brand's reputation for dependability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag_Repairman#Ol'_Lonely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag_Repairman#Ol'_Lonely
cryptonector 3y ago
Bryan Cantrill is famously against vendor lock-in. He wrote a[n in]famous blog about the "FYO point" while at Sun. Oxide may be going for customers that also have the same aversion to vendor lock-in. One thing that Bryan understands is that you can "lock" the customer in with great products and services, as well as continuing development, while also making the customer feel secure in having a way out should you turn into a company that treats locked-in customers as cash cows. The open source strategy (it is a strategy for Bryan and Oxide) is there precisely to do this: make the customer feel they can leave you, but then not. For your deeply technical staff, having source code access is a big deal too, since it enables them to better understand the products they use. How big is the market of sufficiently-vendor-lock-in-averse customers? I don't know -- that's not my remit. But there's the size of that market right now, and whether Oxide (and any other companies with similar visions) can grow that market by sheer willpower. I make no predictions. What if Oxide can get the next Netflix to use their stuff instead of a public cloud?
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  > "FYO point" https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140230/http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc/20040828 https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140230/http://blogs.sun.... And "FYO" stands for Fuck You Oracle.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Oxide is the definition of vendor lock in. All of their hardware is unique... even down to the choice of fans. Fan burns out? Now you've got to buy another one... from them. One of the amazing shifts in the last 20 years was realizing that commodity hardware, when deployed correctly, could do the job.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    If their SW and FW source code is MPL 2.0, that's good enough to limit the extent of vendor lock-in. Sure, it would take time to take over maintenance of that code and then add support for different HW and so on, but there can be a cottage industry of consultancies that can help if ever Oxide vendor lock-in or bankruptcy becomes a problem.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Every single one of the companies you listed started off with unverified hardware, some that failed in the field and continues to today. Why wouldn't you try something else, considering the status quo? This is a nothing-to-lose situation as long as you don't put all your chips into the bet. Every single datacenter has capacity and a need to diversify. It's not even a heroic feat of risk taking.
alberth 3y ago
Re: who is this for. My guess, someone who buys hyper-converged infrastructure today (e.g. Nutanix, VCE, etc) ... but that market is getting smaller and smaller by the day.
INTPenis 3y ago
To be completely honest, this is for the idealists out there. Those of us who are itching to replace our vSphere with oVirt because 1) we have the time and skill to do it, 2) we believe in open source and 3) we believe we can make huge savings by using open source. I expect the oxide supporters to have a hard few years ahead of them of finding bugs in high throughput environments. But at the end of the day it will be worth it just to have another competitor in a pretty boring playing field.
user_7832 3y ago
> however I don't understand who this is for. I can't think of a lot of examples right now but I can already imagine one type of customers for such a product - universities wanting high performance computing. At my alma mater, the HPC cluster/server was in a different slightly distant location. Using something like AWS wouldn't be liked by almost any uni admin, and running a server on premises isn't a great idea in a place that gets the occasional (but rare) power or internet cut. Outsourcing some of these responsibilities may have been nice for our admin.
lucideer 3y ago
> you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible. Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. This gets to the crux of my first thoughts when I read the marketing copy: can they deliver (reliability). They do admit very clearly that what they're doing is hard and that at many points during development they were reluctant to be too ambitious (for obvious reasons), but at each stage they did just that: proceeded with the most ambitious option. That takes a huge amount of self belief that might be warranted or might be hubris. As you point out, untimely the success of Oxide won't only hinge on ability to deliver on that self belief, but more on their ability to convince prospective customers that they have competency to do what noone else can. I fully support every part of their approach in theory but my wizened traveled self thinks it smells a little too good to be true.
dclowd9901 3y ago
I might not be some brilliant CTO, but this product obviously seems to fit _very well_ between two very large product offerings: fully cloud being one and fully on-prem being the other. I’ve often thought it would be cool if you could _buy_ a physical space in a server farm, like literally an area of square feet where the racks are all serviced and provided, but meets all of the needs a company who doesn’t want fully cloud has. This is actually way more clever than that. A lot of people didn’t understand the need for the iPad mini or Mac mini or myriad other products without an obviously existing market. I think this is extremely keen of Oxide to fine the borders between these offerings and fit very snugly between them.
lulznews 3y ago
It’s an acquihire play. It might be possible to beat the hypers with $100 billion and some really good engineers. But building custom racks ain’t the angle to do it.
eep_social 3y ago
I think you actually said it without recognizing. The current state of the art is a fucking train wreck. Choose any layer of abstraction and start picking at it and you’ll find mostly gaffer tape. Scaling up sucks. Rewriting old monoliths to micro services wasn’t a panacea except maybe for cloud vendor profits. You said the hardware market is well defined, which is another way of saying ossified. Particularly when you start comparing it to the expected pace of software. How’s Open19 going? How much liquid cooling do you have in customer racks? In my opinion this is ultimately a software offering that happens to come on vertically integrated hardware. It offers a complete, highly polished API to a minuscule-scale DC. If they can find market fit and make a little bit of money, the next step is to start making deep improvements to things behind the abstraction. From where you sit, you are well aware that you could make huge improvements inside the DC demarc if you could do it without disrupting customers. But you’re probably limited by the terrible, terrible APIs you would be forced to use, that don’t offer the capabilities you need, from vendors who would be happy to chat but would provide timeframes in the 6-18 month range for even a modest improvement. So this, IMO, is about defining that interface to a DC on a single hardware platform with vertical integration, and then scaling up from there. The current hyperscalers will adopt the suite of APIs and capabilities directly, make lower quality copies, or die. Of course all assuming they’re successful enough to get the revenue machine going in the first place which seems likely to me, given the absolute dogshit state of the cloud world today, the trend towards multi cloud, and the business case for moving certain loads back on prem or to a bare metal colo++ offering.
Always_Anon 3y ago
It's basically Sun Microsystems but RIR (rewrite in Rust). The incumbents will eventually release similar products and will eat their lunch.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Having worked in a variety of related fields, my take on this is that hypervisors like VMware have largely eliminated the need for proprietary hardware with “support” contracts. Just buy 3x the capacity in white boxes and turn off anything that breaks. The problem is that the industry hasn’t noticed this yet. The hyperscalers have, and are printing money as a consequence.

apendleton 3y ago

I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was complaining about why every server in the rack needs a CD drive, which was the norm from Dell), because the kinds of stripped-down, super-efficient hardware designs the hyperscalers were building weren't available to the general public, so this is that: hyperscaler-like technology for people who want to own it themselves. I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.

bigironcto 3y ago
Thank you for the response. The problem you described has been solved by the large vendors with Hyper-converged offerings for many years so it sounds like Oxide might be a bit late to the party. I do understand well the rational of running your own servers vs hyperscalers, as well as the repatriation trend but I see Oxide at best as a niche player.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, I don't know anything about this space like you do, I'm just an intrigued observer, but my impression is just: They are going to try to compete with those large vendors. Maybe they won't be able to! Such is life, and indeed is the most common outcome for new ventures. But precious few new ventures have ever entered a market where nobody said some form of "I don't get it, there are already established products in this space, how will this new thing ever get traction?". And yet, lots of new ventures turn out to be competitive with the established players in their market, for one reason and another.
- liotier 3y ago
  Lack of local support does make them a niche player, but everything starts from a niche and those who believe they don't start from a niche disperse their efforts. So, with the hypothesis that Oxyde is smart, the question therefore is: what niche is Oxyde focusing on ?
- Voultapher 3y ago
  Genuine question, you mention Hyper-converged, can you point to anything that comes even close to the experience you presumably get from the Oxide offering.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    Although it might be true that the existing vendors don't provide a good experience, I'm still a little miffed that the OP does not even mention the existence of the existing vendors.

chx 3y ago

Maybe you are not. This offering definitely sounds like something for on prem and not a large data center. Basically, if your core competence is hosting stuff you don't need the extra value they provide. But if your core competence is basically anything else and just need more than a single server under the IT guys' desk then this begins to look very exciting.

bigironcto 3y ago
You might be right but if a customer won't have the size/scale, it won't value the unique proposition from Oxide. I hope I am wrong because it would be great to see a new player with a fresh perspective in the hardware market.
- Voultapher 3y ago
  Bryan Cantril claims the cost of running these could be worth it for many small companies, and if you compare it to EC2 costs for running let's say a CI I find that easy to believe. Maybe it won't be cheaper than Hetzner and co. but that's not what they are competing against on a product level.
itomato 3y ago
If you could drop ship a rack of gear to the Colo before, with the puny compute and bandwidth potential in that number of Rack Units, didn’t it just become massively more appealing?

soulofmischief 3y ago

I wonder if they aim to target small operations and startups initially.

chubot 3y ago

You’re writing like the status quo is a law of nature. At best it’s been that way for a decade or two How many times has computing hardware changed in response to the economics of the parts and the economics of the businesses buying hardware? There are downsides to new models, but money solves a lot of problems So I don’t know about Oxide in particular, but it seems short sighted to bet on stagnation Also Oxide is doing what Google did 20 years ago, and Facebook open sourced ~10 years ago, so it’s not exactly unproven

qaq 3y ago

They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.

candiddevmike 3y ago
Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. It's one thing to be left holding the bag when a SaaS startup goes under, but when you just spent millions on gear that is now completely unsupported... eek. I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. If you're working for a megacorp nothing tends to happen quickly, so there will be a slow roll-out over a multi-year period as old hardware gets phased out and new hardware is brought in for a refresh. If there's a hiccup at any point they'll simply keep the previously purchased stuff running and start a new roll-out with another vendor next fiscal. > I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space. 1. They're just starting out. 2. Some of their customers want to be (or start-out initially) discreet: > Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months. * https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-unveils-the-world-s-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-un...
- guhidalg 3y ago
  F100 waste so many millions already on projects that never see the light of day, why couldn't they throw money at Oxide and see if it works better than their AWS contract?
  - cdchn 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

strgcmc 3y ago

Essentially this same sentiment, applies to any number of things: - Why would anyone buy the Framework laptop, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Dell, HP, etc. has? - Why would anyone use iPhones in the enterprise/IT world, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Blackberry, Microsoft, etc. has? - Why would anyone use Google Fiber, they don't have nearly the network or support that AT&T, Spectrum, etc. has? - Why would anyone ever use Linux (in enterprise, let's say), compared to the support and adoption that Microsoft/Windows offers? - ... I'm purposely picking different examples with varying degrees of success or adoption. I am not claiming that Oxide will be an instant category-dominating success. I don't think Oxide expects to replace HP/Cisco/Dell/etc. overnight, and I don't think a business has to launch with that ambition from the start, to prove that it's worth launching. But this take is so repetitive as to be bordering on cliche -- I don't know if you're self-aware enough to realize, you are literally just a living embodiment of the "Innovator's Dilemma" right now...

endisneigh 3y ago
Your examples are strange. Framework is niche. iPhones do have the pedigree. Google Fiber is barely used. Most folks do use a supported Linux distribution, they don’t roll their own.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > Framework is niche. "Niche" is not a dirty word. Framework is niche, but if they can make their cost structure work (which I have no idea whether or not they can), that's ok. New products don't need to dominate their market in order to be succesful. (But I do agree that Google Fiber is a bad example / a good example of a new product in an established market not working.)
- leetrout 3y ago
  > iPhones do have the pedigree Not in 2007-2008 which is equivalent to Oxide today.
  - endisneigh 3y ago

TimTheTinker 3y ago

You may not be aware of the pain that many large, non-software companies currently have on AWS. Gigantic monthly bills (hundreds of thousands per month) coming from subdivisions that aren't capable or motivated to reduce their AWS budget or usage. To the office of the CTO, Oxide's value proposition (buy instead of rent) could be very motivating. "Hey subdivision A, could we buy a few Oxide racks and move your workload there from AWS? It looks like they would have all the storage and compute you need. Yes? Ok, in 36 months we'll pay your current IT department employees a bonus of 50% of whatever it has saved us vs your current AWS budget."

dewbrite 3y ago
Having worked somewhere with an AWS spend of $30k/mo on _virtually nothing_, I can attest to this. I think most of it was sales demos that never got cleaned up.
- cdchn 3y ago
  Converting your OpEx to CapEx is not a remedy for sloppy bookkeeping.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    But if it significantly reduces total cost, it could still be a useful bandaid.
cdchn 3y ago
Most people who can do this (aren't as entrenched in AWS) end up moving to a cheap VPS provider so that they don't end up having to pay for all the internetworking, facilities, throw redundancy out the window, and then still have to pay the IT burden to heavy-lift all their workloads to this whole new "Oxide" system.
- omarfarooq 3y ago
  > end up moving to a cheap VPS provider Like which?

Nilithus 3y ago

I guess there must be a largish market for this since AWS introduced Outpost to provide the "cloud" to onprem industries. I feel like this is competing with that market. Since many of those use cases probably already run extensive on-prem infrastructure this could appeal to them. AWS outpost talks about industries like healthcare, telecom, media and entertainment, manufacturing, or highly regulated spaces like financial services. I've heard of media companies that process through things like IMAX cameras that have just tons of TB's of data sometimes just for 5 minutes worth of footage. That would simply be too cost prohibitive - in bandwidth alone - to try and move around in the cloud and you don't want to have to wait for things like AWS snowball or whatever. While I think the space is "niche" those niche spaces are not small. Big companies with big budgets.

panick21_ 3y ago

I think they are a competitor to the 'HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged)' part of this. They basically saying 'we will do it better'. Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. > Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. I guess that a risk they are willing to take. Some costumers might wait for a few years until they see Oxide being big enough. Other costumers might be sick of HP/Dell and might take a Risk on a smaller company. Since they seem to have some costumers, some organizations are willing to take the risk to get away from Dell and friends. So I think you are the target audience but you are not willing to risk it until they are larger and less likely to fail and they have a good story in regards to support. I assume they have a support story of some kind, no idea what it is 'Contact Sales' .... In terms of 'trusting they will continue exists' all they can do is survive for a few years until they are pretty established, then more people will be willing buy their product. And hopefully in that time their existing costumers rave about how amazing the product is. Lets hope they don't go bust because all potential costumers are just waiting. Then again, you can't anybody for not buying from a startup.

throw0101c 3y ago
> Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. As someone who has dealt with mostly Debian and Ubuntu in recent years, every time I had to deal with even small numbers of RHEL licenses I often asked myself "Why do put up with this?" (I know why, but still… such overhead.)
johncowan 3y ago
I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  I think that ship has sailed in the 90s. From the 80s to the 90s IBM dropped like 50% of the people that worked there and lots of companies were moving away from mainframes in droves. I'm sure some people got fired for sticking to mainframes to long and wasting money. And likely some companies went bust in the late 90s for having a IT infrastructure based on IBM Mainframes. That's mostly speculation but it seems like it has to be true.

itomato 3y ago

What about from an Integrator or VAR? Would you buy it then?

cdchn 3y ago

I really wonder what their mental image of a product market fit is. They're undeniably doing some cool stuff but myself and it seems like everybody else has to do some serious mental gymnastics to figure out who they sell this to and what needs it fulfills or niches it can fit into.

carapace 3y ago

> Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service? Forgive me for being naive, but that sounds like a great way to differentiate their offering. E.g. the famous Maytag Repairman, who sits at his desk doing nothing because Maytag washers are so reliable that he has nothing to do. > In a time in which the laundry appliances of major manufacturers had reached maturity, differing mostly in minor details, the campaign was designed to remind consumers of the perceived added value in Maytag products derived from the brand's reputation for dependability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag_Repairman#Ol'_Lonely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag_Repairman#Ol'_Lonely

cryptonector 3y ago

Bryan Cantrill is famously against vendor lock-in. He wrote a[n in]famous blog about the "FYO point" while at Sun. Oxide may be going for customers that also have the same aversion to vendor lock-in. One thing that Bryan understands is that you can "lock" the customer in with great products and services, as well as continuing development, while also making the customer feel secure in having a way out should you turn into a company that treats locked-in customers as cash cows. The open source strategy (it is a strategy for Bryan and Oxide) is there precisely to do this: make the customer feel they can leave you, but then not. For your deeply technical staff, having source code access is a big deal too, since it enables them to better understand the products they use. How big is the market of sufficiently-vendor-lock-in-averse customers? I don't know -- that's not my remit. But there's the size of that market right now, and whether Oxide (and any other companies with similar visions) can grow that market by sheer willpower. I make no predictions. What if Oxide can get the next Netflix to use their stuff instead of a public cloud?

kubanczyk 3y ago
> "FYO point" https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140230/http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc/20040828 https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140230/http://blogs.sun.... And "FYO" stands for Fuck You Oracle.
latchkey 3y ago
Oxide is the definition of vendor lock in. All of their hardware is unique... even down to the choice of fans. Fan burns out? Now you've got to buy another one... from them. One of the amazing shifts in the last 20 years was realizing that commodity hardware, when deployed correctly, could do the job.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  If their SW and FW source code is MPL 2.0, that's good enough to limit the extent of vendor lock-in. Sure, it would take time to take over maintenance of that code and then add support for different HW and so on, but there can be a cottage industry of consultancies that can help if ever Oxide vendor lock-in or bankruptcy becomes a problem.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Every single one of the companies you listed started off with unverified hardware, some that failed in the field and continues to today. Why wouldn't you try something else, considering the status quo? This is a nothing-to-lose situation as long as you don't put all your chips into the bet. Every single datacenter has capacity and a need to diversify. It's not even a heroic feat of risk taking.

alberth 3y ago

Re: who is this for. My guess, someone who buys hyper-converged infrastructure today (e.g. Nutanix, VCE, etc) ... but that market is getting smaller and smaller by the day.

INTPenis 3y ago

To be completely honest, this is for the idealists out there. Those of us who are itching to replace our vSphere with oVirt because 1) we have the time and skill to do it, 2) we believe in open source and 3) we believe we can make huge savings by using open source. I expect the oxide supporters to have a hard few years ahead of them of finding bugs in high throughput environments. But at the end of the day it will be worth it just to have another competitor in a pretty boring playing field.

user_7832 3y ago

> however I don't understand who this is for. I can't think of a lot of examples right now but I can already imagine one type of customers for such a product - universities wanting high performance computing. At my alma mater, the HPC cluster/server was in a different slightly distant location. Using something like AWS wouldn't be liked by almost any uni admin, and running a server on premises isn't a great idea in a place that gets the occasional (but rare) power or internet cut. Outsourcing some of these responsibilities may have been nice for our admin.

lucideer 3y ago

> you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible. Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. This gets to the crux of my first thoughts when I read the marketing copy: can they deliver (reliability). They do admit very clearly that what they're doing is hard and that at many points during development they were reluctant to be too ambitious (for obvious reasons), but at each stage they did just that: proceeded with the most ambitious option. That takes a huge amount of self belief that might be warranted or might be hubris. As you point out, untimely the success of Oxide won't only hinge on ability to deliver on that self belief, but more on their ability to convince prospective customers that they have competency to do what noone else can. I fully support every part of their approach in theory but my wizened traveled self thinks it smells a little too good to be true.

dclowd9901 3y ago

I might not be some brilliant CTO, but this product obviously seems to fit _very well_ between two very large product offerings: fully cloud being one and fully on-prem being the other. I’ve often thought it would be cool if you could _buy_ a physical space in a server farm, like literally an area of square feet where the racks are all serviced and provided, but meets all of the needs a company who doesn’t want fully cloud has. This is actually way more clever than that. A lot of people didn’t understand the need for the iPad mini or Mac mini or myriad other products without an obviously existing market. I think this is extremely keen of Oxide to fine the borders between these offerings and fit very snugly between them.

lulznews 3y ago

It’s an acquihire play. It might be possible to beat the hypers with $100 billion and some really good engineers. But building custom racks ain’t the angle to do it.

eep_social 3y ago

I think you actually said it without recognizing. The current state of the art is a fucking train wreck. Choose any layer of abstraction and start picking at it and you’ll find mostly gaffer tape. Scaling up sucks. Rewriting old monoliths to micro services wasn’t a panacea except maybe for cloud vendor profits. You said the hardware market is well defined, which is another way of saying ossified. Particularly when you start comparing it to the expected pace of software. How’s Open19 going? How much liquid cooling do you have in customer racks? In my opinion this is ultimately a software offering that happens to come on vertically integrated hardware. It offers a complete, highly polished API to a minuscule-scale DC. If they can find market fit and make a little bit of money, the next step is to start making deep improvements to things behind the abstraction. From where you sit, you are well aware that you could make huge improvements inside the DC demarc if you could do it without disrupting customers. But you’re probably limited by the terrible, terrible APIs you would be forced to use, that don’t offer the capabilities you need, from vendors who would be happy to chat but would provide timeframes in the 6-18 month range for even a modest improvement. So this, IMO, is about defining that interface to a DC on a single hardware platform with vertical integration, and then scaling up from there. The current hyperscalers will adopt the suite of APIs and capabilities directly, make lower quality copies, or die. Of course all assuming they’re successful enough to get the revenue machine going in the first place which seems likely to me, given the absolute dogshit state of the cloud world today, the trend towards multi cloud, and the business case for moving certain loads back on prem or to a bare metal colo++ offering.

Always_Anon 3y ago

It's basically Sun Microsystems but RIR (rewrite in Rust). The incumbents will eventually release similar products and will eat their lunch.