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.

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!