[jeffrallen]

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.

If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.

[bubblethink]

All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.

[panick21_]

> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here

Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering.

If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.

Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything.

> You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.

Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser.

I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.

[jcgrillo]

I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?

[unnah]

There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.

[FireBeyond]

I worked at Red Hat a few years ago... early 2020s. For our customers, something like 80% of our RHEL customers were still on-prem.

Yes, cloud is huge, etc. But there's a very big iceberg of on-prem.

[briffle]

Honestly, I keep an eye on them because we are a core market for their product.. We run a bunch of K8s clusters, and Postgres databases. We currently use cloud, but if someone bought us up, and demanded we stop all cloud, we could move to something like this in a fairly short time, with limited changes. I wouldn't have to deal with Dell, plus VMWare, plus a SAN company plus a networking company, and hope they all work work together nicely.

I could get a spot in a colo, drop 2 fibers assigned to a few subnets, and be up and replicating our databases in a day or two. We have no need for GPU right now, but do need to often switch DB's to add cpu, ram, etc. Honestly, it would pay off in a year to 18 months, depending on the rumored prices, and colo costs.

[p_l]

Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.

There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.

For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.

[everfrustrated]

You're not wrong. This is old school enterprise dressed up as a start up.

Brian is trying to recreate Sun and using investor money to do so.

Good luck to them but I can't see it ending well.

[cyberpunk]

… Ancient jvm running under wine with webstart just to get to the remote console? ;) I do not miss those days.

[kevinrineer]

You mean you don't have that issue anymore? I'm jealous.

[SSLy]

webstart at least works if non-plugin. Flash not so much -- looking at vcflex.