Part of the problem here is that the people who make the purchasing decisions (like this CTO guy) don't care about "the experience" because they're not the ones unpacking boxes and plugging in cables.

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!

Who is Elmo?

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, Twitter/X CEO, went to the data center and started unplugging things. You can’t make this stuff up! https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the-batshit-crazy-story-...

Why “Elmo”? https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-insiders-users-calli...

I got curious about the book mentioned, and found an EPUB:

data:text/plain;base64,aHR0cHM6Ly92ay5jb20vd2FsbC00ODQxMzg3Ml82NjAyNg==

> we all saw how that went

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.

I was making a bit of a joke there, sorry. It was more about the rather rare scenario of setting up a data centre in a hurry than about the long-term quality of the result.

Elmo's experiment came to mind so I tossed it in there.

Yeah I think this is the interesting question. My (naive, uninformed) interpretation is that Oxide is betting that there is some area in the overlap of the venn diagram between "people who have reasons not to run their businesses on the public clouds" and "people who are not suits but technologists and care about the user experience of setting up and maintaining their infrastructure because they want to do it themselves / without hiring lots of people and service contracts".

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 wonder if we'll see this space you describe grow as AI startups and scaleups - or even internal departments in large enterprises - start to increase in number...

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..

Dell's VxRail has been very popular and successful. Not perfect, but pretty good, and I think the market leader.

HPE Simplivity has done well.

Also, Nutanix.

These seem to solve the ‘host your own cloud’ problem, but are still standard server blades requiring a ton of surrounding hardware and maintenance. Oxide is entirely integrated.

"A ton of surrounding hardware" is vague, generally speaking it's bog standard network switches that are needed.

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.

VxRail's the market leader? Last I touched it, it was a mountain of integration faults and vendors pointing fingers at each other. Maybe it's easier in larger or more traditional environments, but I'd be apprehensive of hyperconvered if VxRail's the best available

Evo:RAIL from VMware had those issues, but Dell VxRail has been relatively smooth at scale IME.

Although it might be true that the existing vendors don't provide a good experience, I'm still a little miffed that the OP does not even mention the existence of the existing vendors.

This I don't get. It's marketing copy, from a small upstart. They don't need to link to their established competitors...

OK, then at least I'm glad someone in the comments pointed out their competitors.

Agreed, it's why I read stuff like HN comments! Marketing copy is not a good source for comparative information.