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.
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?