How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

I really love Oxide to an unhealthy amount (it's become a bit of a meme among my colleagues), but sometimes I do wonder whether they went about their go-to-market the right way. They really tried to do everything at once - custom servers, custom router, custom rack, everything. Their accomplishments are technologically impressive, but, as somebody who is in a position to make purchasing decisions, not economically attractive. They're 3x more expensive than our existing hardware, two generations behind (I'm aware they're on track for a refresh) and don't have any GPUs. E.g. what I would have loved to see is just an after-market BMC/NIC/firmware solution using their stack. Plug it into a cheap Gigabyte system (their BMC is pluggable and NIC is OCP) and just have the control plane manage it as a whole box. I'd have easily paid serveral thousand $ per server just for that. All the rack scale integration, virtualization, migration, network storage, etc stuff is cool, but not everyone needs it. Get your foot in the door at customers, build up some volume for better deals with AMD, and then start building the custom rack stuff ... Of course it's easy to be a critic from the side lines. As I said, I do really love what the Oxide folks are doing, I just really hope it'll become possible for me to buy their gear at some point.

Id also wish I could get to play around with a cheaper version of their tech, but they probably havw enough customers that really want a large-scale solution that is completely customizable

Oxide are doing great work. Hoping they can probe the market a bit more for us out on the sidelines preparing to drop in and compete with some similar tech.

I'm curious what their burn rate is.

I kinda feel that their focus is more on building a great technology (& culture?) than a great business.

Not necessarily a bad choice; after all, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

We are definitely very much building a business! We have the iconoclastic belief that you can build a business by having a terrific team building a great product that customers love. And we're getting there![0]

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/18/llnl_oxide_compute/

First, thanks for the love -- it's deeply appreciated! Our go-to-market is not an accident: we spent a ton of time (too much time?) looking at how every company had endeavored (and failed) in this space, and then considering a bunch of other options besides. Plugging into a "cheap Gigabyte" system wouldn't actually allow us to build what we've built, and we know this viscerally: before we had our system built, we had to have hardware to build our software on -- which was... a bunch of cheap Gigabyte systems. We had the special pain of relearning all of the reasons why we took the approach we've taken: these systems are a non-starter with respect to foundation.

You may very well not need the system that we have built, but lots of people do -- and the price point versus the alternatives (public cloud or on-prem commodity HW + pretty price SW) has proven to be pretty compelling. I don't know if we'll ever have a product that hits your price point (which sounds like... the cost of Gigabyte plus a few thousand bucks?), but at least the software is all open source!

You just described why commodity servers won over engineered systems that came before Oxide (like Nutanix, Sun / Oracle Exa*, VCE etc).

So I totally agree with your go-to-market comment, because it’s also a bet against cloud.

I wish them luck though.

Please forgive my tergiversation. I fully trust that you know your path and I know how annoying it is to be why-dont-they-just'd. As I said, I'm rooting for you.

+1 for use of tergiversation

So my question: any Arm-based system or GPU-based system on the horizon?

> The meaning of TERGIVERSATION is evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement : equivocation

There's two dictionary definitions of tergiversate. One is the one you quoted, the other is one of desertion. Both meanings of the word are pejorative in the sense that the word comes with a connotation of betrayal of a cause. What I wanted to express was an acknowledgement that I understood the feeling that you get when someone who's clearly a fan of your work nevertheless does not provide a clear endorsement. It's easy emotionally to dismiss people who "just don't get it". But when someone does get it but chooses to equivocate, that can feel like an emotional betrayal. So I was looking for a word that covered that with the right connotation. I originally used apostasy, but it didn't feel quite right, because I wasn't really renouncing, more failing to fully endorse, so tergiversation it was. Of course having to write an entire paragraph to explain your word choice kind of defeats the purpose of choosing a single well fitting word over just writing a sentence of simple words that explains what you mean. But hey, I write enough technical writing, documentation, reports, grants, etc. all day where clarity is paramount that I feel like I get to have a little vocabulary treat in my personal writing ;).

And yet, non of the hyperscalers use commodity server. They are buying parts from the OCP but those are hardly 'commodity' servers. So did they win?