[BaconPackets]

I'm currently reading up on this, but I'm struggling to match a use case.

It's not Openstack. It's not VMware. It's not kubernetes. It's not proxmox. It's not Xen. It's not Anthos. It's not GCDE. It's not Outposts.

So who and what is it for? Where is the use case that none of these other products fit the bill?

Especially for an on premise use case.

[steveklabnik]

This article is about technical details of the product that aren't user-facing.

The business is fairly straightforward: we sell computers, a rack at a time. You as a customer can buy a rack, and put it in your data center. The rack offers an in-browser management console, built on top of an API you can use too. You use these tools to set up virtual machines. You can then use those VMs however you want. You get the cloud deployment model but with the "I buy the servers" ownership model.

There's a few different advantages depending on how you want to look at it.

Starting from a rack as the smallest unit rather than 1U brings a lot of advantages, but there aren't really vendors currently selling these sorts of things, instead "the hyperscalers" have internal teams building stuff like this. There are a lot of organizations who want hyperscale style servers but aren't going to start a division to begin making them themselves.

Another advantage is that everything is designed to work with the rest of it: you (or the OEM you're buying from) are not cobbling together a bunch of hardware, firmware, and software solutions from disparate vendors and hoping the whole thing works. Think "Apple," or "Sun," rather than "IBM PC Compatible." This is easier for users, as well as allows us to build systems we believe are more reliable.

There's also smaller things, like "as much as possible everything is open source/free software," which matters to some folks (and allows for interesting things like the above blog post to happen!) and is less important to others.

[gilgad13]

> There are a lot of organizations who want hyperscale style servers but aren't going to start a division to begin making them themselves.

How does this differ from what large players like Dell are offering under the "hyperconverged" moniker. For example, Dell's Vxrail[0] appears (from marketing speak, anyway) to be a single rack with integrated networking and storage that you can ask to "just start a vm".

[0]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/converged-infrastructure/vxrai...

[BaconPackets]

Thanks! That gives me a bit more context.