Congratulations to the Oxide team! It's a tough market out there :)! I'm still personally frustrated that I don't get to play with the hardware (too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers), but I'm excited to see that they're successful and hopefully they'll come around to my use case eventually :). In the meantime, I appreciate that they're building largely in the open - every once in a while I'll glance at their issue tracker for light bedtime reading. Just recently we had some fun internally throwing our controls software at their thermal loop as a usage example - it's often hard to find compelling real-world systems to use as openly sharable examples (of course we have interesting customer problems, but that's all NDA'd), so having companies build real stuff in the open is fantastic. Great company, wish them the best.
> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers
You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.
What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.
I always thought a company like Railway would be an Oxide customer. But Railway is building their own servers in their own datacenters. So I am really curious who is small enough to buy Oxide, but large enough to need Oxide?
The same sorts of customers that SGI used to sell to in the pre-cloud era. DoD. Oil and gas. Finance.
People with deep pockets and good reasons to want to keep certain parts of their infra very close to home. Also the kind of people that expect very highly skilled people to show up and get their in-house app running.
(I was an SGI HPC customer once. I still miss the old SGI. Sigh.)
how does it compare to Nutanix?
Of topic, but where the hell did Nutanix come from? I've never heard of them until recently and all of a sudden, they are being marketed as a serious competitor to VMware etc.
They have been around for nearly 20 years. I viewed them as an also-ran until Broadcom decided they didn’t need any of us as VMware customers anymore. Now Nutanix seems like a viable path for on-prem VM workloads that need a new home for those who don’t want to part with an arm and a leg on licensing but can’t move to public cloud either. I’m not sure how much of that market Oxide can capture. Not sure Nutanix is still doing the hyperconverged hardware themselves anymore.
They have been around for a long time and were one of the first to have a hyper-converged solution where all storage in the nodes is pooled and usable by any node. They also have their own hypervisor. You can get 4 nodes per 2U so pretty dense. In the datacenter my company uses a company had dozens of Nutanix boxes sitting in the hallway for months before they finally installed them. They are pretty notoriously expensive so only really used by companies with big IT budgets.
OK, must be one of those weird things where I just never noticed them. Super strange because I've been very aware of this space for decades.
Yeah, me too. I know that they have already explained why they can't, but I'd love for them to build a mini box that we could try it out on.