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Comment by zapita | Hacker News Reader

Who is the target customer for this?

Cantrill has always said it's for people who want Facebook class on-premise infrastructure but don't have a $900B market cap and a hundred engineers designing and building custom boxes.

Oh, and open firmware.

Can definitely see it for a company size of Dropbox, big enough to already be working with ODMs, big enough to be sensitive to the kind of headaches you get from a heterogeneous fleet of ILOM processors designed by deranged engineers.

Dropbox is big enough that they could just acquire Oxide now before they even get to market. That might even be the plan all along. I can't imagine there are more than like a dozen companies that are their target market, i.e. big enough to need Facebook-level datacenters but not big enough (yet) to have that engineering team.

> ILOM processors designed by deranged engineers.

As opposed to what? But seriously, why do all ILOMs suck and are there any exceptions?

The people behind OpenBMC, RunBMC, LibreBMC are hoping to fix this.

They don't all suck. I always liked how Sun/Oracle and Fujitsu's did their LOMs.

I get the target of HyperConverged infrastructure. It's a pretty big market: potentially all private/colo datacenters. And there are only a few players left. Dell/EMC/VMWare, Nutanix, Cisco's schizophrenic offerings, a waning HP, cloud providers trying to make a 'hybrid' play, etc. And most don't buy one or two of these things. It's rows and rows.

But most of those are so entrenched and wrapped up in their customers. I imagine the target here is actually acquisition, it would just be too hard to get a foothold as an up-and-comer.

Also it usually means giving loaner gear to companies for an extended period for them to evaluate pre-purchase, showing your support, etc. That's a lot of up-front cost for someone without a warchest.

I'm also kind of surprised by the site. It sells to geeks well, but isn't the normal "look at our customers in key industry segments!", "something something Gartner magic quadrant", "whitepapers!" thing. Selling to execs on these things is usually a matter of convincing them they're not making a "bad" decision. They're "cool", but enough industry people agree with them that it's not career limiting if it doesn't pan out.

I like the idea of the product, and it would be nice to have another player. But it's like starting a new car company, and I feel like they're selling to mechanics.

This level of integration surely won't come cheap, from what I recall of Server purchasing a target price of ~200-500k per rack would be expected on a TCO of roughly 2x the rack price over 3 years. (Assuming you are buying from Quanta/SuperMicro or other commodity integrator)

It's possible the prices are different now, but you would need customers looking to drop > 1 million dollars in CapEx for the management capabilities they are providing. Possibly non-cloud Fortune-500?

The core customer profile appears to be aging startups that know how their software behaves and are currently way over 2k cores on AWS.

Startups with no significant use of anything from AWS other than EC2+EBS with an existing well-tested storage migration procedure.

That reminds me a lot of the Sun Microsystem mega servers from 20 years ago. Those were kind of the cure-all solutions to high scalability web services before Google et al. pioneered cloud-like services on commodity software.

Its kind of like if you took those servers and put a cloud like software layer on top and made many of them work together.

They'd have to sell these at a significant loss to make up for the risk any company would have to take to build out a DC on first generation hardware from a startup.

I mean, how many companies are building out DCs left and right these days? Not many. This will fit in nicely for brand new projects that require nothing more than a rack. Once a company puts something through the paces for 2-3 years, and the engineers managing it love it, then the slow migration from UCS (or Nutanix) to Oxide begins. This is usually how I've seen new hardware architectures introduced at mid and large size companies.

good question. not someone too large to want to pay the per-node margins. not someone too small to want to pay .. not someone who is satisfied with using VMs on a cloud provider. not someone who is selling these as part of a turnkey solution for whatever segment is left.

that said, I do feel persistently sad that we can't fix structural problems because the market is such a gradient descent world.

I can see this also being appealing for large orgs with sensitive data they don't want to put in a public cloud.

Plenty of companies live outside the cloud on their own hardware.

The vast majority of companies live on their own hardware for business-critical workloads. It's not even close.

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