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...
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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.
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.