All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.
I worked at Red Hat a few years ago... early 2020s. For our customers, something like 80% of our RHEL customers were still on-prem.
Yes, cloud is huge, etc. But there's a very big iceberg of on-prem.
Because cloud customers don't pay for Linux and they use Ubuntu.
Because when customers go from on-prem to cloud they throw away their distro tooling and support needs? I get it, I've worked at plenty of small and large cloud-native places, but saying "All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with." you're not at all accurate. Or if it is shrinking, it is still a huge market, likely a much larger market than you think.
I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here
Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering.
If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.
Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything.
> You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.
Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser.
I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.
>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.
For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
The claim that you need a 10x better product to win any market share is simply incorrect, both logically and historically.
Maybe if people that bought Dell had a deep love for Dell products and were deeply integrated unable to move, but even then 10x is a waste exaggeration.
But if you have any serious academic literature that underlies this 10x claim I'm happy to take a look.
> You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
And neither does Dell and they are worth 80 billion $. And AMD doesn't make semiconductors, so they relay on other people IP. And TSMC doesn't make their lithographic machines or many other things, relaying on other people's IP. And all those materials relay on other people IP to be brought to market in the first place.
This is just a silly argument that for some reason puts CPU design companies as 'the real deal' and everybody else is somehow not good enough.
Historically good systems companies make just as good margin as most CPU design companies, specially those that don't have near monopolies.
> it's actually not such a good story
They are making inroads in a market that is 100s of billion $ large and people invested 300M$+ in them because they see costumer demand. If that's not good enough for you then I don't know what to tell you. I wish any of the starups I have worked at that kind of opportunity.
It seems to me you operate in a sense where anybody that doesn't go for a monopoly in a 5 trillion $ market is somehow not 'worthy' of being a startup. That just a very strange perspective on reality.
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.
There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.
For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.
Surely vmware licenses are more easily replaced via Proxmox? Why would you care about Oxide, which is a hardware vendor?
Proxmox is fine if your vmware deployment was quite small. Single oxide rack at max density is going to similar values as official scaling sizes for proxmox, and very much isn't limit of what we did with vsphere.
And Oxide sells a complete hardware + software solution, including virtualization and SDN - essentially it's a physical equivalent of up to 32 node virtualization cluster per rack, with builtin SDN and SD-SAN, that already has features to combine for more.
Is this about limits to what the Proxmox folks will officially provide support services for, or perhaps what can be comfortably managed in the Web UI? These are very valid concerns either way, but the Proxmox VE software itself does provide a comprehensive API and that should scale quite a bit higher.
You're not wrong. This is old school enterprise dressed up as a start up.
Brian is trying to recreate Sun and using investor money to do so.
Good luck to them but I can't see it ending well.