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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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451–460 of 994 posts

Re: The Cloud Computer

#451

Post by siliconc0w »

I really appreciate the vision and the technology (also the dedication to opensource).

The difficulty is that HP/Dell/NetApp/etc are well established and maybe if you're a SME you can appreciate the benefits of an end to end integrated solution but most of the people making purchasing decisions largely don't. It's easy to market on CapEx but difficult to market on OpEx - you're asking customers to (likely) pay more for a similar performance invariably less featureful solution from a small company which they're then locked into largely leaning on the promise it'll be easier to operate (where is your GPU integration, object storage, shared filesystem, integrated kubernetes, etc). They then have to convince all the incumbent software vendors to support their software (e.g SAP/oracle/etc) on this specialized hardware.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#452

Post by Always_Anon »

Voultapher wrote: post #448
Upvoter33 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as a big deal - rather, I see it as a huge amount of venture cap spent on some very bright people to build something no one really wants, or, at best, is niche. Also, it has little to do with the cloud; it is yet another hyperconverged infra. Weirdly, it is attached to something very few people want: Solaris. This relates to the people behind it who still can't figure out why Linux won and Solaris didn…

Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.

>Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway.

Their competition has open source firmware as well:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-syste...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#453

Post by steveklabnik »

aeyes wrote: post #431
qaq wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.

Maybe something like Dell VXBlock didn't exist when they pitched their idea? Any hardware contracts are very long term and you'll have a hard time getting me to switch to a different vendor, especially when they also want to come in with an unknown operating system which I have to run.

Dell's hyperconverged solutions did exist when the company started. We believe we can compete.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#454

Post by electroly »

skywhopper wrote: post #392
silverlake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from AWS Outpost?

You own this. AWS Outpost is leased and you still also pay for the resource usage on top of the outpost unit itself. And this would not be integrated with your AWS account.

It's mostly not true that you still pay for resource usage on top of the Outpost unit. That's only true, AFAIK, for EBS local snapshots and Route 53 Resolver endpoints. The big boys--EC2 instances, S3 storage, and EBS volumes--are all "free" on Outposts. That is, included in the cost of the unit and not double-charged.

Charging for EBS local snapshots on your own Outpost S3 storage and Route 53 Resolvers on your own compute is a weird one. I don't know how they defend that. To me, it seems indefensible.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#455

Post by addisonj »

I have been following oxide for a bit, and really don't have to add to the tech conversation, but do want to say:

Congrats to the team on reaching this big milestone and (in my eyes at least) just as much congratulations on doing it in a way that has been unique and sticking to values that seems to drive a strong positive culture (at least from the outside looking in).

Shipping products is hard, and only getting harder. IMHO, one of the big drivers of that is just how complex every market has became. Building and selling software alone is so much more multi-disciplinary than it was 10 years ago and adding hardware to the mix is upping that by a huge factor. As I look around, I see so many companies struggle to build teams that can handle the huge range of required tasks. To see a company like Oxide that (once again, from the outside a least) seems to have things together on so many fronts, especially while doing it while sticking strongly to some core values, is pretty inspiring.

Not to get overly cynical, but I don't think it is an extreme opinion to say that current start-up culture feels like you have to make big compromises in what you believe in order to be successful. Whether that be open-source, how you value and pay employees, or even just rushing things to deliver that aren't ready.

While I acknowledge Oxide has some well-connected, experienced founders that I am certain enabled them to get the resources and trust to do things their way, I really hope they kill it so that other founders and builders can learn that you still can build not just financially successful products, but great organizations that truly care about their values.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#456

Post by fishtoaster »

flumpcakes wrote: post #278

I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don't see this is different. This looks, by far, the simplest way to run workloads outside of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). It seems they only support up to virtual machines but this is still miles ahead of VMWare, Nutanix, or CISCO ACI to my eyes. This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps…

> This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps team could manage it. With the other 'hyperconverged' infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it.

That seems like the best explanation of the value here I've heard so far! I could definitely see a number of SMBs whose use cases are expensive in AWS/etc and would be a good fit for a few racks in a datacenter, but who don't want the cost of a team to manage them. If this significantly lowers the skill threshold necessary to run servers in a datacenter, I could see that being a huge value prop.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#457

Post by twicetwice »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #155
jjice wrote: post #137

Huge fan of the people behind Oxide as well as the concept behind the product. Can someone tell a layman like myself where a 44M Series A funding round lands among other Series A rounds? I was at a startup during 2021 and when we raised 25M, it was a big deal for us and seemingly huge. Compared to that 44M is insane. Is this notably high or is my frame of reference just small? Either way, I really look forward to see…

People raise those sorts of numbers for web apps all the time. It actually doesn’t sound that big for such a broad hardware and software company with long and high touch sales cycles ahead of them.

Do they raise those sorts of numbers in series A, though? Other comments in this thread seem to suggest they've raised a surprisingly large amount of money for such an early stage of the typical fundraising process. If it is atypically high it would make sense to me—it's hardware which requires more up-front capital, and it's a rockstar team so I understand why investors would have confidence in them—but from what little I know about fundraising it does seem remarkable to me.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#458

Post by delfinom »

apendleton wrote: post #249
bigironcto wrote: post #241

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-c…

I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was c…

>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.

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.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#459

Post by cryptonector »

bigironcto wrote: post #241

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-c…

Bryan Cantrill is famously against vendor lock-in. He wrote a[n in]famous blog about the "FYO point" while at Sun. Oxide may be going for customers that also have the same aversion to vendor lock-in.

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?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#460

Post by aidenn0 »

cdchn wrote: post #380
steveklabnik wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously different marketing copy speaks to different people. But that is referring to how, when you buy a rack from us, you don't need to put everything together and cable it all up: you pull it out of the box, plug in networking and power, boot the thing up, and you're good to go. Installation time is hours, not days or weeks, which is the norm.

>plug in networking and power No cables, except for a few cables.

They mean no intra-rack cables, which are the overwhelming majority of cables on a typical rack.
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