Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

"anyone who has at least a rack full of Dell/HPE hardware"

Big enterprise and government customers want white glove support, 10+ year continuity, ISV certification for their hardware. They will pay a premium, but they expect a premium and not in reimagined firmware, but really support. I can't see how Oxide could compete there or why it would want to.

"If Oxide computers had existed when I was working on sorting out the infrastructure for in-country domestic payments at Visa, I'd have lobbied pretty hard to adopt them. Assembling basically the same thing from a bunch of random vendors and terribly integrated software was an infuriating, expensive process that only achieved great results because we invested the time and money into it that I'd have rather budget allocated to writing core payments & settlement applications."

I'm not doubting this person's story, but perhaps he doesn't know exactly what Oxide would give either. This kind of thing is exactly what you can write a check to Dell or HPE for and they've already assembled those things with their boxes and their hardware partners they've got the firmware and software working, and the solution is all certified by SAP and Oracle and Microsoft and whoever else.

But Visa didn't go that way, they instead paid the premium for experts on staff or contracted to do more of it in house. And they got a great result.

Between the two, I'm having a hard time seeing where Oxide would fit. Pay a premium for the hardware solution and for the in house IT team?

One aspect of being responsible for the entire stack is that we can give excellent support. It’s never some other company’s problem.

> This kind of thing is exactly what you can write a check to Dell or HPE for

See my other link elsewhere in the thread for why we’re different than writing that check to Dell.

But even then, this means you do know there is a market for this kind of server. It’s now “why Oxide instead of Dell” instead of “why does Oxide exist.” I’m sure lots of people will still buy servers from other folks for a very long time, but some will also choose us. That’s the joy of startups, we’ll all just have to wait and see!

You aren't responsible for the entire stack though. You have Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Redhat, Oracle, SAP, Intersystems, etc.

And this type of "support" is surely a huge burden in terms of manpower and infrastructure required. You can't scale this and have the core developers on call solving customer problems. You could have a hypervisor architecture which is technically better and requires less support overhead than KVM for example, but can you really compete with Redhat for governments and enterprise white glove support just with that advantage?

> See my other link elsewhere in the thread for why we’re different than writing that check to Dell.

This one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324

The problem is once you're talking a real solution, the system management and provisioning and BMC and partitioning stuff is not the really hard part.

Plug in and power on another rack and the systems show up in the management console and you can partition and provision them, sure. IBM and other "enterprise" vendors have that. They're clunky but they have procedure manuals and training and they just work for the most part.

It's what you actually do with those racks is the difficult thing. Enterprise isn't as smooth or scalable as "hyperscale" here. It's a lot of old crufty legacy in house and ISV software.