is this just a purchasable version of Borg? kubernetes on steroids?
Our $100M Series B
461–470 of 522 posts
Re: Our $100M Series B
#462Building sovereign systems management with low overhead is an incredibly important goal. For this I salute them for pursuing that path. However their mistake is that it's a hardware problem. It's actually almost entirely a software problem, modulo convincing some hardware vendors to make their ILOM/IPMI implementations not be buggy or suck. Disclosure, I work in the software automation space.
Our thesis is that it's both a hardware and software problem! Which, as steve said, is why we're doing both. We can look at designs across the whole stack, from chips chosen, FPGA implementations, hubris management and control plane software to accomplish this goal. By doing these together, we can accomplish fundamentally different designs and tighter integration than any one of those multi-company silos can even if they tried to work together.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#463I appreciate the craftsmanship of Oxide — it’s like a finely handcrafted Swiss watch.
I just hope they can survive in a world dominated by relatively inexpensive, general-purpose Apple Watches.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools? Look at who oxide is selling to and for what reasons. It's about compute + software at rack scales. It does not matter if it is good it matters that it's integrated. Gear at this level is getting sold with a service contract and "good" means you dont have to field as many calls (keeping the margins up). > Everything we he…
As someone only tangentially familiar with this domain, I have questions about this: > Look at their CPU density and do the math on power. It's fairly low density. Look at the interconnects (100gb per system). Also fairly conservative. It's the perfect product to replace hardware that is aging out, as you wont have to re-plumb for more power/bandwidth, and you still get a massive upgrade. It sounds like the CPU densi…
For a small company, a limited TAM isn't a problem (and honestly is probably an advantage) if the overall market is big. Datacenters as a whole are a ~$30B market per year. The last thing you want as a small company is a bunch of different customers pulling you in different directions. By limiting your TAM, you limit the number of problems you need to solve for a few years, and if everything goes well and you start outgrowing your TAM, you can expand later.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's seriously nothing complicated about this. Define ownership. Who cares about owning a bunch of computers? If you can get the compute, and you pay up front for it once, and then you can sell "it" later, and it's cheaper than renting, what does it matter if the compute comes in the form of a physical box or if it is in the cloud? So these are all things that matter about ownership! To me, occupying a physical sp…
You are casually transitioning between something that is pretty well understood through the history of online commercial computing (i.e. 1970s): 1) owned hardware versus leased/timeshared/rented hardware or services and 2) concepts of financial instruments that many readers here are probably not intimately familiar with. If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy…
> If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy futures instead, we'd be having a silly discussion.
Exactly. Just because they are similar in some senses doesn't mean that they're fungible. Generator manufacturers still have a business even though you can purchase energy futures.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#466I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events.
So what is Oxide and why would I use that over OpenStack?
Re: Our $100M Series B
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are casually transitioning between something that is pretty well understood through the history of online commercial computing (i.e. 1970s): 1) owned hardware versus leased/timeshared/rented hardware or services and 2) concepts of financial instruments that many readers here are probably not intimately familiar with. If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy…
> If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy futures instead, we'd be having a silly discussion. Exactly. Just because they are similar in some senses doesn't mean that they're fungible. Generator manufacturers still have a business even though you can purchase energy futures.
okay well this is an interesting and engaging conversation, if you guys someday make something in the $1,000 range you have a customer.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's seriously nothing complicated about this. Define ownership. Who cares about owning a bunch of computers? If you can get the compute, and you pay up front for it once, and then you can sell "it" later, and it's cheaper than renting, what does it matter if the compute comes in the form of a physical box or if it is in the cloud? So these are all things that matter about ownership! To me, occupying a physical sp…
It's not clear to me that the counter-party risk is _remotely_ similar between the two offerings. Someone reselling indefinite access to AWS could relatively easily set things up to go "poof" after a few years, whereas if it's your box, that's not possible. Now, critical components of the box could croak, and someone could still be screwed, but even there, you likely have more options for support than just paying Ama…
yeah... AWS isn't going to set up anything to go poof, Oxide, despite making something awesome, will go poof if it charges too little money for it.
Amazon is expensive but not that expensive.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#469I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I…
I was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?
I imagine most of the customers are highly technical, not typical generic business class.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?
What percentage of enterprise IT compute has not moved to a public cloud?
Every single company I've worked with over the past 5 years has been repatriating from the cloud to their own DCs or colo.
The cloud doesn't pan out for long running, predictable workloads. Most companies are and will continue to use VMs for many years.