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(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge
by bithavoc 2mo ago
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
- ahl 2mo agoHit me up @oxidecomputer.com
- ProAm 2mo agoThis is an embarrassing response.
- SleekoNiko 2mo agoHow so?
- ProAm 2mo agoIgnoring a sales request for a company that wants to spend ~1M only to say pls reach out to me again after we had our second funding round in 2026? The OP literally could go back to their sales lead db and respond like a real business. So yeah unprofessional and embarrassing.
- mi_lk 2mo agoyou can't deny that comes off condescending for a _client_ looking for your business
- pyb 2mo agoBecause OP's email is in their bio, for one.
- ProAm 2mo agoHe asked the business for a sales rep through their sales portal a year ago. That is enough. Shouldnt have to complain a year later on a social media platform to get a response that says "hit me up".
- Alien1Being 2mo agoLogical. They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
- boomskats 2mo agoI expect the majority of Oxide's customers are actively trying to escape Broadcom's VMWare hell. Can't see how something like that would make sense.
- MisterTea 2mo agoMakes sense for Broadcom.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoIt makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns. The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
- panick21_ 2mo agoSome of their larger costumer might want to buy them instead so it doesn't happen.
- dkbrk 2mo agoI doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
- senderista 2mo agoVC funding is not for "a sustainable long-term business".
- elzbardico 2mo agoIf your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
- api 2mo agoYou are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better. Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs. The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
- antonvs 2mo agoYou’re expressing a very narrow engineer’s perspective that doesn’t consider the realities of managing bare metal hosting at any kind of scale. These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with. The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant. There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
- icedchai 2mo agoThere are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.
- calvinmorrison 2mo agoRight like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
- ellieh 2mo agotbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
- Nextgrid 2mo agoI wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error). Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
- tecleandor 2mo agoVC or private equity fueled companies are weird. At my place we are spending 8 figures a year just in AWS, and it's not like they planning to move to bare metal but, they're in fact removing stuff from their old datacenter. And that bill doesn't include some of the other SaaS like Mongo or Elastic. With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.
- esseph 2mo agoThat's just any company with serious money.
- steveklabnik 2mo ago(Former Oxide) An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing. This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality. (Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)
- Sayrus 2mo agoWe had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
- MichaelZuo 2mo agoHow did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.
- esseph 2mo agoYou don't go to oxide for lowest cost.
- jiveturkey 2mo agoI think the idea is that, in fact, you do. Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
- esseph 2mo agoYou get a fully auditable hardware and software BOM, and you get an air-gapped, API-driven, on-prem cloud. You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
- nujabe 2mo agoI think it’s fair to assume the idea is for it to eventually be more cost effective than other solutions as they scale up.
- esseph 2mo agoI've never been under the impression that is the case. They are filling a niche no one else is for a small pool of fish with virtually endless pockets.
- api 2mo agoSay you are spending $1M. Round up. Or even 0.9M. Their sales might only return inquiries with cloud costs ending in M.
- jiveturkey 2mo agoWell that isn't that much. $1M / month feels more like it.
- aatd86 2mo agoForbid a business can grow, haha
- apimade 2mo agoThey work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX. Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming. Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
- kaladin-jasnah 2mo agoI also think they work with government customers. I saw an open job position on their website requiring TS/SCI security clearance and full scope polygraph.
- nunez 2mo agoI believe JPL and INL were their launch customers for gov.
- throwaway2037 2mo ago> They don’t sell to SaaS companies. Is this true? If so, how do you know? I have listened to almost of their podcasts. I don't recall them saying there are any type of customer they refuse to sell to. They told a funny story about a sales call with a US national laboratory. They went into the call assuming they would be asking for supercomputer. Instead, they learned they need a bunch of regular rack compute, not all supercomputers. Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
- wmf 2mo agoMore like the rack isn't viable for SaaS.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoDo you have any evidence for this claim? Or, can you explain why it isn't viable for SaaS?
- manquer 2mo agowe spend 2-2.5M a year I wouldn’t consider us their product scale yet. My understanding is the full rack is about $1.2M and smallest half rack is about $600k and this was before the RAM and other price hikes now. You are still going to have some residual cloud workloads(so all AWS won’t migrate ) and HA and DR regions etc plus the maintenance and incidentals (power , connectivity ). I don’t expect anyone less than 5M spends and high base loads is a good fit for their offering.
- AlphaSite 2mo agoI mean its capex vs opex, assuming a 5 year deprecation period thats 1.2 million isnt too bad, its 10% of their aws spend.
- manquer 2mo agoThat is the starting point though , minimum you need to buy one more for FO/DR if you care about uptime . It is not once and done you have some continuous costs in either direction. 1. you will not be able to still move all your workloads only your base loads . 2. There will be residual workloads not only if they are spot/flexible bursts but also they are too deeply integrated to Paas offerings . 3. you have to pay for power cooling and network (and its backup) for 5 years . 4. Finally you also have pay for infra team to maintain, this is increasingly difficult (and expensive) to hire and retain . Don’t get me wrong I would love to be able buy something like this, but the cost economy is pretty steep and 1-2M spends is too early (it is not on oxide, serious hardware costs a ton these days )