How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

If any Oxide staff are here, I'm just curious, is BlueSky a customer? Seems like it would fit well with their on-prem setup.

Not Oxide or Bluesky, but firstly I'd suggest that asking the company about their customers is unlikely to get a response, most companies don't disclose their customers. Secondly, Bluesky have been growing quickly, I can only assume their hardware is too, and that means long lead time products like an Oxide rack aren't going to work, especially when you can have an off the shelf machine from Dell delivered in a few days.

events.bsky appears to be hosted on OVH. Single-product SAAS companies less than a few years old are unlikely to be a major customer cohort for Oxide.

Nope, but many of us (Oxide staff) are big fans of what Bluesky is doing!

One of the Bluesky team members posted about their requirements earlier this month, and why Oxide isn't a great fit for them at the moment:

https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3laha2upw3k2z

> most companies dont disclose their customers

In my head I'm imagining an average landing page. They slap their customers on there like stickers. I doubt bluesky would stay secretive about using oxide if they did

Those customers listed on the front page of companies are there as part of an agreement. Usually something like a discount. Certainly they are not listed without permission. 10x that if it is a case study.

Oxide is very open, we are happy to talk about customers that allow us to talk about them. Some don’t want to, others are very happy to be mentioned, just like any other company.

> we are happy to talk about customers that allow us to talk about them

This is what I meant by "don't disclose", I didn't mean that Oxide was in any way secretive, but that usually this stuff doesn't get agreed, and that it would make more sense to ask the customer rather than the company selling as Oxide won't want to disclose unless there's already an agreement in place (formal or otherwise).

I think they often are listed without permission unfortunately, and often literally based on on the the email addresses of people signing up for a trial. I see my company's logo on the landing page of many products that we don't use or may even have a policy preventing our use of.

Gotcha. That totally makes sense, I would t have thought about it that way.

> Also prices don't make sense for us.

Oof.

Appreciate the reply! Been following Oxide for a few years now and really enjoy the technical blogs :)

Why is that "oof"? They're using commodity servers today. Oxide does not offer commodity servers.

Just that it highlights the challenge that Oxide faces, that they're effectively offering a "luxury" product in a deeply commoditized space.

That's true if you think the market is SaaS upstarts like Bluesky and maybe less true if you think of the market in terms of who buys hardware. I remember early on at Matasano working for a house account, a major US corp that isn't a household name, and being shocked 2 years in when I finally had to do something in their data center (a FCIP appliance assessment) and seeing how much they'd spent on it. Look at everyone who runs (and wishes they weren't) z/OS today, or Oracle. There's more of them than I think a lot of HN people think.

Good on 0x1d5 to bring back the era of expensive, proprietary hardware that everybody loved so much.