The cost case only works for GPU heavy workloads which this isn’t - wrong chassis, wrong network, etc.
Tofino2 is the wrong choice because even when they made that choice it would have been clear that it’s doa. Intel networking has not been a success center in, well, ever. That’s a selection that could only have been made for nerd reasons and not sensible business goals alignment or risk mitigation.
When you make an integrated solution you’d better be the best or close to the best at everything. This does not seem to be the best at anything. I will grant that it is elegant and largely nicer than the hyper converged story from other vendors but in practical terms this is the 2000s era rack scale VxBlock from Cisco or whatever Dell or HPE package today. Marginally better blade server is not a business.
They also make a big deal and have focused on things no one who actually builds data center pods cares about.
I actually hope they get bought by Dell or HPE or SuperMicro. Those companies could fix what’s wrong here and benefit a lot from the attention to detail and elegance on display.
On-prem buyers are doing cost reduction and cost reduction targets things like, as one example, the crazy cost of GPU servers on the CSPs. Your run of the mill stuff is very hard to cost reduce.
You can see their sort of lack of getting it by using Tofino2 as their switch. That’s just a very bad choice that was almost certainly chosen for bad reasons.