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195 points tosh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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KenoFischer ◴[] No.42210167[source]
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.
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chambers ◴[] No.42211397[source]
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?

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1. bcantrill ◴[] No.42211767[source]
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/