But immediately got myself to "what does a server OS do anyway, doesn't it just launch VMs? You don't need Linux, just the ability to launch Linux VMs"
Tell me more? :)
As I understand it, re: vertical integration, the term is actually "hyperconverged". Here, that means it's designed at the level of the rack. Like -- there aren't per compute unit redundant power supplies. There is one DC bus bar conversion for the rack. There is an integrated switch designed by Oxide. There is one company to blame when anything inside the box isn't working.
In addition, the pitch is they're using open source Rust-based firmware for many of the core components (the base board management controller/service processor, and root of trust), and the box presents a cloud like API to provision.
If the problem is: I'm running lots of VMs in the cloud. I'm used to the cloud. I like the way the cloud works, but I need an on-prem cloud, this makes that much easier than other DIY ways to achieve (OMG we need a team of people to build us a cloud...).
(That said I think other than saying "hyperconverged" your broad points are correct.)
This is fair, especially as it follows a discussion of how you're building at the rack level, which is more like a mainframe than current "hyperconverged" offerings. Recommend others read the linked post.
The products that are on the market for an AWS-like experience on-prem are still fairly horrible. A lot of times the solutions are collaborations between vendors, which makes support a huge pain (finger pointing between companies).
Or, a particular vendor might only have compute and storage, but no offering for SDN and vice-versa. This sucks because then you have two bespoke things to manage and hope they work together correct.
These companies want a full AWS experience in their datacenter, and so far this looks to be the most promising without dedicating huge amounts of resources to something like Openstack.
... Including the bill!
e.g., https://www.scylladb.com/2020/09/15/scylla-cloud-on-aws-outp...
Disclosure: I worked at ScyllaDB.
You buy their product once, but it only has bug and security fixes for 3 years.
Which means every business is going to need to upgrade on a cycle anyway.
Whilst I think we will see a trend back towards more on-premise hardware I don't think SaaS is going away anytime soon. And in fact it's arguably better for everyone because the software is being continually maintained.
Took me from "why would people go with this over Dell?" to "holy shit, I'm expecting Dell to do software and make nvidia/red hat/etc/etc etc/etc etc etc help out. lol!"
* also, how destructive it is. never, ever, ever let ppl talk shit about other ppl. There's a difference between "ugh, honestly, it seems like they're focused on release 11.0 this year" and "ughh they're usless idk what they're thinking??? stupid product anyway" and for whatever reason, B made you normal, A made you a tryhard pedant
As to why I'm personally excited: I enjoy the amount of control having such an on-prem rack would afford me, and there surely could be a great amount of cost-savings and energy-savings in many scenarios. Sometimes, you just need a rack to deploy services for your local business. I like the prospect of decentralizing infrastructure, applying all the things we've learned with IaaSes.
Of all of the 6 infrastructures I've seen, only 1 of them is half decent, with 6 dedicated teams around the datacenter working closely together (by dedicated I mean, nothing is required of them concerning the core software product that the company develops). Network, Unix/Virtu, Windows, Storage, PC, and datacenter. That's 30+ people just to run a couple big datacenters and a few more server rooms. The service was actually quite good with VMs/zones delivered under an hour and most tech issues solved in half a day. The other infrastructures were either bigger or smaller, with more or less people, and were all terrible, sometimes needing weeks of email exchanges with excel attached to get a single VM.
AWS was the dream everywhere I went for everybody. Oxide may be coming out with a product that will solve a LOT of issues. SmartOS/IllumOS has all the tech to be self-sufficient (virtualization, storage, SDN...), add support for networking and storage and you get a complete product that a handful of people can run (well, you still need a windows team in most cases but fine).
I would pay a premium just to not have to deal with HPE, DELL, etc
AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc]
Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only major difference being the "in your datacenter" part. Since you own the cost of your datacenter, Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS, but how do you do that with low volume [and from the look of it not-cost optimized, but instead fairly tank-like] bespoke hardware? Feels like the pricing / customer fundamentals are going to be pretty rough here outside perhaps a few verticals.
I imagine, some of the customers will order 1-2 racks half full and over a few years possibly add a few sleds, these will probably demand great GUI/ manual experience and possibly competitive Oracle/ SAP/ MSSQL benchmarks and I can imagine Veeam integreation. Other customers such as the DoE or some big enterprise customers will order whole rows of racks and demand perfect automation options. That is just a guess.
Which should be pretty easy. I don't know the exact costs but in a previous Oxide discussion the number 1M was thrown around. If that's roughly correct, that is comfortably less than a single year of AWS bills at most startups I've been in (except the very tiny ones < 15 people).
Haven't seen any performance numbers either so admittely estimating here, but from what I know about building racks of 1U servers and knowing that Oxide is more efficient, I can believe an Oxide rack should handily outperform the AWS VMs we (the startups) were paying >>>100K/mo for.
If these numbers are anywhere in the ballpark, an Oxide rack should easily be saving quite a bit of money already by year two.
IllumOS is the OS/360 to Oxide's System/360. (It won't get that popular but it's a fair enough comparison for illustrative purposes)