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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell it's one of their most significant features, and certainly one of its most capital intensive. And I don't know how many startups land institutions like INL as their launching customer, and enough other big enterprise leads to warrant their follow up investment.

If you remove that component from their value prop, they're not that much different from Dell.

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Just a quick point of clarification that while our boot architecture is very important (e.g., a service processor in lieu of a BMC, the elimination of UEFI entirely, etc.), we are quite a bit different from Dell beyond that. There are certainly many hardware-level differentiators (e.g. DC busbar-based design, blindmated networking, built-in switch, etc.) but the big differentiator is really what these things allow: entirely integrated software. The Oxide rack comes with all of the software to run elastic infrastructure (that is, the distributed system that comprises the control plane), including switch software, storage software, etc. And then (critically!) the capacity to update all of this.[0]

All of it is a far cry from the offerings of Dell/HPE/Supermicro, which rely on others to provide the software that turns the hardware into real infrastructure.

[0] https://oxide.computer/blog/systems-software-in-the-large

Right, my apologies for downplaying it. That you control both the hardware and the software through the entire stack has tremendous benefit, especially for this type of customer. My point was if you as a customer don't value that aspect of Oxide's pitch, which you obviously are much better at fully conveying, then you'd be seriously considering Dell/HPE/Supermicro as well.

For what it's worth the last time I had to procure a small cluster the offer Dell made was ridiculously overpriced, didn't meet the specifications I asked for, and the whole experience didn't inspire confidence in the software they were pitching either. We were a small underfunded startup so we were never gonna drop 200k on that storage solution (0.5PB HDD + ~80TB SSD), but if we did have that kind of budget we probably would have gone with one of the smaller but more focused parties there instead like maybe TrueNAS, I bet there's a beautiful market for Oxide as well in that segment.

The ability to securely update each component is quite an achievement

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