Can anyone ELI5 what Oxide's offer is? I've looked at their website and still got no clue. Is it hardware + software I can purchase and use on-premise? Is it a PaaS / yet another cloud provider?
The differentiator from virtually all existing on-prem cloud products is that we are a single vendor who has designed the hardware and software (which is as open source as we can possibly make it, by the way, hence announcements like this) to work well together. Most products combine various other products from various vendors, and are effectively selling you integration. We believe that that leads to all kinds of problems that our product solves.
Another factor here is that we only have two SKUs: a half rack and a full rack. You don't buy Oxide 1U at a time, you buy it a rack at a time. By designing the entire rack as a cohesive unit, we can do a lot of things that you simply cannot do in the 1U form factor. There is a running joke that we talk about our fans all the time, and it's true. Because our sleds have a larger form factor than a traditional 1U, we can use larger fans. This means we can run them at a lower RPM, which means power savings. That's the deliberate design choice. But we also have gained accidental benefits from doing things like this: lower RPM also means that our servers are way quieter than others. That's pretty neat. Some early prospective customers literally asked if the thing is on when it was demo'd to them, because it's so quiet. Is that a reason to buy a server? Not necessarily, but it's just a fun example of some of the things that end up happening when you re-think a product as a whole, rather than as an integration exercise.