I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.
I do understand well the rational of running your own servers vs hyperscalers, as well as the repatriation trend but I see Oxide at best as a niche player.
They pay other people to do that and they don't really care if it's a miserable time. And if it takes days instead of hours, who cares? Rarely is someone setting up a data center under the gun (unless you're Elmo and we all saw how that went).
Factors like scalability and ongoing support are much more top of mind.
Not saying that Oxide can't address this, and I love Oxide's focus on the experience, but I think this bottom-up approach to convincing customers is going to be a steep climb..
But they seem to be up for steep climbs, so I wish them all the best!
Why “Elmo”? https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-insiders-users-calli...
data:text/plain;base64,aHR0cHM6Ly92ay5jb20vd2FsbC00ODQxMzg3Ml82NjAyNg==
I mean... it went quite well all considering? There was some site instability for a brief period of time and now it's back to working normally. The initial hypothesis was that the data center was vital and so couldn't be shut down quickly. Turns out the hypothesis was incorrect. So I'm not quire sure that makes the point you're trying to make.
Of course Twitter is definitely not all use cases, so trying to generalize from one data point isn't a great idea in general.
Elmo's experiment came to mind so I tossed it in there.
I'm not sure how big that space is, or whether it is likely to grow or shrink over time, but I'm intrigued by the proposition they're testing here!
I know there's already plenty of concerns about giving cloud-based AI services access to corporate data, so maybe there's a growing market there..
HPE Simplivity has done well.
Also, Nutanix.
Oxide is entirely integrated with their own custom (though based on OSS?) networking via Tofino based switches and software. Could be good, but a lot of subtle bugs can occur at this layer. It's a risk.
I set up some Cisco server hardware a few years ago, and only by the time I'd managed to order it I was already wishing I had a better choice. When it arrived and the remote serial was unusable to fix the BIOS ("American Megatrends copyright 1984" at 9600 baud? No thanks.) I was ready to give up and go back to AWS.
This is a market ready for a kick in the ass, which Oxide plans to do.
All Oxide has to do to win that market is ship software and firmware that doesn't suck, because there are incumbents but the incumbents are clearly incapable of doing so.
But precious few new ventures have ever entered a market where nobody said some form of "I don't get it, there are already established products in this space, how will this new thing ever get traction?". And yet, lots of new ventures turn out to be competitive with the established players in their market, for one reason and another.
Yea, there's definitely a market in defense here. Because even though Azure/AWS offer Govcloud, its inadequate for non-civilian connected infrastructure. This offers benefits of writing "modern software" and deploying it in similar modern fashion while keeping it completely running isolated. Imagine being able to make your command and control operations actually decentralized and not vulnerable to a missile strike on a single datacenter.
How many times has computing hardware changed in response to the economics of the parts and the economics of the businesses buying hardware?
There are downsides to new models, but money solves a lot of problems
So I don’t know about Oxide in particular, but it seems short sighted to bet on stagnation
Also Oxide is doing what Google did 20 years ago, and Facebook open sourced ~10 years ago, so it’s not exactly unproven
I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
If you're working for a megacorp nothing tends to happen quickly, so there will be a slow roll-out over a multi-year period as old hardware gets phased out and new hardware is brought in for a refresh.
If there's a hiccup at any point they'll simply keep the previously purchased stuff running and start a new roll-out with another vendor next fiscal.
> I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
1. They're just starting out. 2. Some of their customers want to be (or start-out initially) discreet:
> Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-un...
I bet the trick is to keep the perfect balance of high profile wins and and losses. You want to be defensible as an expert to the non-technical folks while obviously a fall guy to the technical ones I guess.
I think these guys aren’t that, though, they seem to be selling a real, cool product.
That equation changes with the entire software stack being open-source
This is the secret none of those existing vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) are willing to tell you: They have very limited technical expertise on what they sell you and outside of some specialized troubleshooting they can do, they'll defer to their vendors. The understanding is that you've got the intellectual horsepower on staff to cope with their various shortcomings.
Of course that framing itself is bad - F100 companies aren't usually quite that monolithic. By the time they get that big there's a heterogeneous set of processes, equipment, systems, etc. Some parts of the company may use Oxide right away because they see it as a solution, and others may keep using the IBM mainframes, and other still will keep using racks/blade servers from Dell for eternity.
Any hardware contracts are very long term and you'll have a hard time getting me to switch to a different vendor, especially when they also want to come in with an unknown operating system which I have to run.
With compute one size doesn't fit all, maybe you need more disk space or maybe you need GPUs... I'm sure Oxide will come out with different spec modules over time.
The idea is similar: It's a rack which runs virtualized workloads and you don't have to think much about individual machines.
- Why would anyone buy the Framework laptop, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Dell, HP, etc. has?
- Why would anyone use iPhones in the enterprise/IT world, they don't have nearly the support/pedigree that Blackberry, Microsoft, etc. has?
- Why would anyone use Google Fiber, they don't have nearly the network or support that AT&T, Spectrum, etc. has?
- Why would anyone ever use Linux (in enterprise, let's say), compared to the support and adoption that Microsoft/Windows offers?
- ...
I'm purposely picking different examples with varying degrees of success or adoption. I am not claiming that Oxide will be an instant category-dominating success. I don't think Oxide expects to replace HP/Cisco/Dell/etc. overnight, and I don't think a business has to launch with that ambition from the start, to prove that it's worth launching.
But this take is so repetitive as to be bordering on cliche -- I don't know if you're self-aware enough to realize, you are literally just a living embodiment of the "Innovator's Dilemma" right now...
Framework is niche.
iPhones do have the pedigree.
Google Fiber is barely used.
Most folks do use a supported Linux distribution, they don’t roll their own.
Not in 2007-2008 which is equivalent to Oxide today.
Not to mention the comparison is inane to begin with. Using an iPhone for your enterprise and moving your tech infra to a relatively unknown company are not equivalent at all.
This just seems like a twist on hyper-converged infrastructure + open source.
I mean, I love their design. I just don’t think it’s special enough to warrant mass adoption. And I certainly wouldn’t be deploying at scale in an enterprise environment with zero widespread adoption.
Small entities will just use cloud same as always. Large companies have a multitude of unique needs that won’t all be catered for by a single box. The big vendors will clean up on that front as usual.
"Niche" is not a dirty word. Framework is niche, but if they can make their cost structure work (which I have no idea whether or not they can), that's ok. New products don't need to dominate their market in order to be succesful.
(But I do agree that Google Fiber is a bad example / a good example of a new product in an established market not working.)
"Hey subdivision A, could we buy a few Oxide racks and move your workload there from AWS? It looks like they would have all the storage and compute you need. Yes? Ok, in 36 months we'll pay your current IT department employees a bonus of 50% of whatever it has saved us vs your current AWS budget."
Like which?
Or in other words, is migrating to Oxide somehow assumed to be easier than migrating to some other non-locked-in cloud infrastructure?
But even so, the point stands. There's a lot of non-wasteful AWS spend happening that is frustrating when you look at the raw numbers and consider how much cloud capability you could outright buy from Oxide and have a similar developer experience.
Oxide appears to be a shoo-in for companies that used to run a bunch of racked Dell/HP servers, migrated to AWS, hate their monthly AWS bills, and still have the server rooms they used to have.
Since many of those use cases probably already run extensive on-prem infrastructure this could appeal to them. AWS outpost talks about industries like healthcare, telecom, media and entertainment, manufacturing, or highly regulated spaces like financial services. I've heard of media companies that process through things like IMAX cameras that have just tons of TB's of data sometimes just for 5 minutes worth of footage. That would simply be too cost prohibitive - in bandwidth alone - to try and move around in the cloud and you don't want to have to wait for things like AWS snowball or whatever.
While I think the space is "niche" those niche spaces are not small. Big companies with big budgets.
Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it.
> Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.
I guess that a risk they are willing to take. Some costumers might wait for a few years until they see Oxide being big enough.
Other costumers might be sick of HP/Dell and might take a Risk on a smaller company.
Since they seem to have some costumers, some organizations are willing to take the risk to get away from Dell and friends.
So I think you are the target audience but you are not willing to risk it until they are larger and less likely to fail and they have a good story in regards to support. I assume they have a support story of some kind, no idea what it is 'Contact Sales' ....
In terms of 'trusting they will continue exists' all they can do is survive for a few years until they are pretty established, then more people will be willing buy their product. And hopefully in that time their existing costumers rave about how amazing the product is.
Lets hope they don't go bust because all potential costumers are just waiting. Then again, you can't anybody for not buying from a startup.
As someone who has dealt with mostly Debian and Ubuntu in recent years, every time I had to deal with even small numbers of RHEL licenses I often asked myself "Why do put up with this?" (I know why, but still… such overhead.)
That's mostly speculation but it seems like it has to be true.
Unrelated, but a "costumer" makes costumes. I think you were looking for "customer".
Forgive me for being naive, but that sounds like a great way to differentiate their offering.
E.g. the famous Maytag Repairman, who sits at his desk doing nothing because Maytag washers are so reliable that he has nothing to do.
> In a time in which the laundry appliances of major manufacturers had reached maturity, differing mostly in minor details, the campaign was designed to remind consumers of the perceived added value in Maytag products derived from the brand's reputation for dependability.
One thing that Bryan understands is that you can "lock" the customer in with great products and services, as well as continuing development, while also making the customer feel secure in having a way out should you turn into a company that treats locked-in customers as cash cows. The open source strategy (it is a strategy for Bryan and Oxide) is there precisely to do this: make the customer feel they can leave you, but then not.
For your deeply technical staff, having source code access is a big deal too, since it enables them to better understand the products they use.
How big is the market of sufficiently-vendor-lock-in-averse customers? I don't know -- that's not my remit. But there's the size of that market right now, and whether Oxide (and any other companies with similar visions) can grow that market by sheer willpower. I make no predictions.
What if Oxide can get the next Netflix to use their stuff instead of a public cloud?
One of the amazing shifts in the last 20 years was realizing that commodity hardware, when deployed correctly, could do the job.
If you're buying millions of this stuff, what says that you're going to get support for it in 5 years. Who knows... maybe Cisco wakes up and gives them an offer they can't refuse and then shuts down the company.
By the way, people endlessly gripe about Google deprecating things and that's just software...
My two cents is that this isn't really an innovation business model, it's an execution business model. Their proposition seems to be that they can execute a a server rack with integrated hardware and open-source software so well that customers will love their product.
Maybe they'll just end up with tons of nerds our there thinking, "I really wish I could justify investing in Oxide racks, but it just doesn't make sense for my business / I just can't sell it to my CIO", but hey, maybe not!
It's better to just think to yourself: "this doesn't seem like a useful product to me, I don't understand why people find it interesting, oh well", and move on.
I actually do think what they are doing is innovative across the board. They are taking all of the common feedback anyone who has run large scale data centers (which I have) and applying it to a brand new product. Unfortunately, they are doing it in a way that is extremely vendor specific.
`import { Api } from "@oxide/api"`
`Understand and debug issues faster`
They've got 231 repos in github...
Metaphorical fans, but also fans, and everything else. It was an example from the blog post. I looked at that super innovative and cool backplane. Sure, warranty covers it for the first N years, but then what? What happens when things turn into a Tesla situation and you get horror stories of delays and poor results?
I think 'commodity' is generalized at this point. Given the choice of Supermicro and Oxide. I'm going to pick Supermicro. They can deliver me a clean rack of machines too. Why would I go with Supermicro? Big company, lots of products, lots of choices, I can work with them to get what I want.
Oxide is too singular. It is one rack, one design, one set of specifications. Don't get me wrong, there is some value in that... and I'm sure you'll sell plenty of hardware, but I'm not finding the value in it for myself. That's the part that I mean by 'commodity'.
As far as I can tell, there exists no "open source stuff developed by a large community of people" to run integrated server rack hardware. But if you're using such a thing, then I'd like to know what it is!
Very. Just look at the USA defense spending budget. If you’ve ever worked on AWS-govcloud or secret, you know there’s a market here.
This has huge use for military too. Imagine having a black site or off-grid location but still needing a rack of things. What if you could spin up an entire enterprise infrastructure by just loading up this rack?
If this team manages to get this thing government certified, there’s a lot of profit to be had.
This is already being done quite successfully with existing offerings. Flexpod, VxRack, Nutanix, there are a ton of options.
"Other products already exist" is never a strong counterargument to the existence of new products.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140230/http://blogs.sun....
And "FYO" stands for Fuck You Oracle.
My guess, someone who buys hyper-converged infrastructure today (e.g. Nutanix, VCE, etc) ... but that market is getting smaller and smaller by the day.
I expect the oxide supporters to have a hard few years ahead of them of finding bugs in high throughput environments. But at the end of the day it will be worth it just to have another competitor in a pretty boring playing field.
I can't think of a lot of examples right now but I can already imagine one type of customers for such a product - universities wanting high performance computing. At my alma mater, the HPC cluster/server was in a different slightly distant location. Using something like AWS wouldn't be liked by almost any uni admin, and running a server on premises isn't a great idea in a place that gets the occasional (but rare) power or internet cut. Outsourcing some of these responsibilities may have been nice for our admin.
This gets to the crux of my first thoughts when I read the marketing copy: can they deliver (reliability).
They do admit very clearly that what they're doing is hard and that at many points during development they were reluctant to be too ambitious (for obvious reasons), but at each stage they did just that: proceeded with the most ambitious option. That takes a huge amount of self belief that might be warranted or might be hubris. As you point out, untimely the success of Oxide won't only hinge on ability to deliver on that self belief, but more on their ability to convince prospective customers that they have competency to do what noone else can.
I fully support every part of their approach in theory but my wizened traveled self thinks it smells a little too good to be true.
A lot of people didn’t understand the need for the iPad mini or Mac mini or myriad other products without an obviously existing market. I think this is extremely keen of Oxide to fine the borders between these offerings and fit very snugly between them.
The current state of the art is a fucking train wreck. Choose any layer of abstraction and start picking at it and you’ll find mostly gaffer tape. Scaling up sucks. Rewriting old monoliths to micro services wasn’t a panacea except maybe for cloud vendor profits. You said the hardware market is well defined, which is another way of saying ossified. Particularly when you start comparing it to the expected pace of software. How’s Open19 going? How much liquid cooling do you have in customer racks?
In my opinion this is ultimately a software offering that happens to come on vertically integrated hardware. It offers a complete, highly polished API to a minuscule-scale DC. If they can find market fit and make a little bit of money, the next step is to start making deep improvements to things behind the abstraction. From where you sit, you are well aware that you could make huge improvements inside the DC demarc if you could do it without disrupting customers. But you’re probably limited by the terrible, terrible APIs you would be forced to use, that don’t offer the capabilities you need, from vendors who would be happy to chat but would provide timeframes in the 6-18 month range for even a modest improvement.
So this, IMO, is about defining that interface to a DC on a single hardware platform with vertical integration, and then scaling up from there. The current hyperscalers will adopt the suite of APIs and capabilities directly, make lower quality copies, or die.
Of course all assuming they’re successful enough to get the revenue machine going in the first place which seems likely to me, given the absolute dogshit state of the cloud world today, the trend towards multi cloud, and the business case for moving certain loads back on prem or to a bare metal colo++ offering.
The problem is that the industry hasn’t noticed this yet. The hyperscalers have, and are printing money as a consequence.
As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for.
The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible.
Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.
Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service?
Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.