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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Who’s the target buyer of Oxide?

I ask genuinely … because I don’t understand who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain?

In a world of cloud and dedicated hosted servers (where the users of the server is not the buyer of the server) - who would buy Oxide?

It seems like whoever can build the cheapest server wins now.

Said differently, cloud has completely changed the value-chain in server buyers

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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.

Plenty of companies still run hardware. A lot of midsize enterprise and a lot of non-tech/non-software F500. And quite a few won’t move to the cloud - between retailers who don’t want to fund big bad Amazon, hyperactive security departments who (rationally or irrationally) see physical ownership as a necessity, and organizations who have needs which are poorly suited to cloud offerings, it’s not like the datacenter hardware market is completely dead by a long shot.

You can proxy this demand by looking at VMWare sales. Anyone running a large amount of baremetal VMWare virtualization has a large on premise deployment and could find managed rack products like Oxide interesting.

I think the answer amounts to "anyone who has at least a rack full of Dell/HPE hardware".

Dell manages an annual revenue of greater than $20B, so on-prem HW is clearly going strong, regardless of whether or not you think it should be.

> who will spend the premium for a rack server that is easier to maintain?

Not my area, but based on other areas: "easier to maintain" can translate directly to "fewer engineer/admin hours consumed", which can translate directly to saved money (or resources that are now freed up to be put toward something more useful)

Banks, hedge funds, governments, … anyone who needs a lot of grunt and cannot offload to the cloud. I would say they target the same segment of buyers who go for Oracle’s “engineered” / ExaData / Exalogic machines.

Large enterprises running things on prem. Governments etc.

For normal businesses cost is important, for smart governments, hedge funds etc. one may have leeway to spend a little more for a better product or better tail risk etc.

People who have to maintain servers in house for various reasons. Maybe they need to run some software that needs to run even if they lose Internet connectivity. Or maybe they're working on secret stuff and their CIO/CTO has decided that this needs to be on prem instead of on the cloud.

Oxide business model explained:

You know how you can buy pizza in a cardboard box? What happens if you need to feed a party of ~80 people? You end up getting dozens of pizza boxes delivered.

Oxide Pizza delivers all that pizza in a single box.

dang so like all my pizzas are squished?

thats what the rack is for duh

Nah, the little plastic table placed in the center of the pizza is keeping the boxes from bowing.

https://twitter.com/robfig/status/1415695070548959238

I hope they target schools so the next generation goes to them to scale up their startups in the future.

ultimately somebody has to buy and own and operate the underlying hardware of the "cloud".

obviously AWS, azure, etc do their own hardware procurement and totally bespoke stuff in house.

so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers.

> so this would be targeted at any smaller players in hosting companies that are not at that massive size of azure, but need vast quantity of servers.

But my understanding Oxide is/will-be priced as a premium over a typical x86 server.

It seems unlikely that any hosting company is going to pay a premium just for a bit more convenience.

Note: I'm not trying to be a "hater". Just genuinely not understanding the market here.

you are correct, margins are very thin in hosting company business and the absolute most server performance/number of nodes for the least money is very important.

have been on the manufacturing side of this before.

bulk x86-64 servers such as you could buy from the vendors you meet at the computex taipei are a big part of it.

things along the same general idea as the supermicro that is 2U high and has four discrete nodes in it, but cheaper.

long/narrow motherboards with dual socket xeons

and other similar stuff...

if the price for this is not market competitive with that, or just a bunch of 1U commodity dual socket servers, the only people buying it will be enterprise/specialty end user and not hosting operations.

Does “premium over a typical x86 server” mean a premium over the cheapest servers you can find or a premium over servers sold by (e.g.) Dell?

As I understand it, this isn't really a premium product in that sense.

What they seem to want to do is give you what a rack (or 2) full of Dell Servers plus the price of a VMWare license would give you.

And then you should also save money on maintenance, space, updates, compliance and so on.

If the approach to firmware and virtualization means you can have just 1/2 employ less then that's already a huge amount of money.

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