In the end, the mainframe wins
Their product isn't at all like a mainframe.
Our $100M Series B
511–520 of 522 posts
Re: Our $100M Series B
#512Investors are likely betting there is an AI play buried deeply in here somewhere. The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything successful on their own. I predict this company will be another zombie.
> never done anything successful on their own
I would love to know what you consider success then ...
Re: Our $100M Series B
#513Re: Our $100M Series B
#514Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ? A bit humorous from that perspective given Cantrills dislike for Larry Nevertheless cool company and product.
The opposition to Oracle was never about building vertically integrated machines.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
What observations have you made that they are not or would not be focused on solving customer problems?
That they're instead focused on standardizing employee salary, or promoting their company through niche political websites. These are decisions that the CEO is making, which means they're distracted. This is fine when you've received nearly 200 million in total funding, but won't work once you're expected to add the same level of value while being profitable.
> That they're instead focused on standardizing employee salary
That's kind of a strange statement.
Because every company has some salary policy and structure. Would you for other companies say 'obsessed with finding different salaries for each employ'?
Seems to me having a fixed salary will lead to less overall discussion and less time spent on salary discussions. Letting the executives actually focus on the product instead of endless salary discussions.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their product isn't at all like a mainframe.
Their MVP is of course lacking the reliability and availability features of mainframes. But future products will probably improve on this POV and intrude into the existing mainframe space.
The reliability and availability is kind of what makes it a mainframe. That and that you can partition machines on low level. Neither of those this product does.
Do you have some kind of insight on their future product roadmap? As far as I know their next version will just be a new sled into the existing cubby.
It also uses commodity processors and is open software. Totally unlike what we typically associate with mainframes.
So really its not like a mainframe in any aspect other then its not a PC architecture. Its much more like the machines that people like Google or Facebook use.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#517Good for them! I used to walk my dog past their (office? warehouse?) in Emeryville, and when the weather was warm they'd have the doors open and the giant server stacks just sitting there, looking awesome. I guess it's not really a concern that someone will steal something that looks like it'd take a forklift to move. The ultimate aspirational homelab setup, ngl.
Vandalism / sabotage would still be a concern even if theft isn’t ?
Honestly, not particularly. That area is really chill. It's literally across the street from Pixar's headquarters, and a block or so down from city hall. Utility outages are probably the biggest 'issue' in that neighborhood; we had power outages not infrequently, and this week they had their water main burst and shut down half the businesses nearby.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month. T…
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad the pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances were $25/hr. That’s over $200k/yr for the reserved instances so within two years I’d spend enough to buy my own 8x H100 pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) plus enough to pay an engineer to b…
It's actually not that bad for GPUs considering their useful life is much shorter than regular compute. DC-grade CPU servers cost 12-24mo of typical public cloud prices but you can run em for 6-8 years.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're telling me it's important to people to "own" instead of "rent." Well I can manufacture an "Own" out of a "Rent": I write up a contract for my customer that says "$1,000,000 for 100 EPYC servers", I ship an empty steel box, the end user gets an AWS account which they cannot add anything to, and it has 100 EPYC server metal instances in it. I pay the bills in that account. Okay? Now I have created "owning" out…
Okay well my feedback to you is, maybe have a chatbot read what I am saying to you, and ask for a charitable interpretation, which is the site’s rules. It’s simply a “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck” argument. It’s not complicated. The way I am looking at things is how a lot of execs at giant companies and VCs look at things, you are welcome to ask them too, or ask for that frame of reference from…
> It’s simply a “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck” argument.
Look, I'm not an expert in the field and I think you're making some kind of real point here. But for many organizations, there is no acceptable substitute to physical possession of the hardware, and sometimes even running it in an airgapped environment. You can synthesize a financial instrument of some kind, maybe, but it appearing the same from a financial perspective isn't the same as actual possession.
> You guys just raised $100m, you should be able to engage over questions of arb or whatever, and just know this stuff, and be able to talk to bankers and talk like a banker.
Both Steve and I are mere software engineers :)
Re: Our $100M Series B
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad the pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances were $25/hr. That’s over $200k/yr for the reserved instances so within two years I’d spend enough to buy my own 8x H100 pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) plus enough to pay an engineer to b…
It's actually not that bad for GPUs considering their useful life is much shorter than regular compute. DC-grade CPU servers cost 12-24mo of typical public cloud prices but you can run em for 6-8 years.
> GPUs considering their useful life is much shorter than regular compute
This looks like FUD. People have taken GPU's that had been used for mining and in turn used them just fine for years. Nothing breaks, the hardware is just fine. Obviously newer generations of GPUs are more efficient, but CPU hardware improves a lot too.