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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.

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Just a small note, but from when we announced this back in October, two customers were mentioned: https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...

> Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.

This describes every single product in its early days in existence. If you're planning to launch any other way, you've doomed the company before you even launched. Lucky few survive, in spite of, and that's what contributes to the 9/10 startups statistic.

Lazer focus on the first set of customers that will help you cross the chasm. Only then mass market.

I hope they sooner or later release a smaller, cheaper, homelab product for people to learn or for startups that will lead to future rack sales or workers.

This is a common request and we absolutely understand the desire, but I suspect such a thing, if ever, will be a long time off. Given that the product is designed as an entire rack, doing something like this would effectively be a different product for a different vertical, and we have to focus on our current business. Honestly it's kind of frustrating not being able to reciprocate the enthusiasm back in more than just words, but it is what it is.

I appreciate the response, I totally understand and don’t expect it to materialize soon, but am still hopeful that someday it will be a possibility.

For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales.

Some examples:

x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the default in the datacenter. It was hard for ARM to break in and it mostly happened when AWS did it by fiat. If ARM had made some loss-leader actually useful laptops and workstations available, it might have happened sooner.

But x86 largely didn’t deploy AVX-512 in client machines, so people who wrote libraries only used it for fun or benchmarking, so it wasn’t widely used, and most users flubbed it anyway. (And might have gotten it right if they had the hardware on their desk.)

People target Nvidia datacenter GPUs. But people have targeted them for a long time, because they have them in their gaming machines too.

Xilinx used to push free academic gear quite hard, because that was a big lead into people learning how to use their gear.

So, if I were giving Oxide straightforward sales advice, absolutely don’t get distracted with small systems. But maybe, if Oxide thought of it as lead generation, Oxide should do it anyway. If I could buy something small enough to be affordable but big enough to be useful [0], I might get one. And I’d target it with my own stuff, and fix bugs, and evangelize it at little cost to Oxide.

[0] For me, maybe 100-150TB of spinning rust (or cheap NVMe or the ability to attach a JBOD), plus anywhere from 4-64 cores, in a format that works on 120V and fits in, say, 16U or less, at a credible price point, would be quite likely to net Oxide a sale. (Just one sale but still!) It could be sold as a developer thing, and there would be absolutely no expectation that it would perform like the real thing. If I found it awesome, I might buy a couple more. But I would also use it and make things work on it and talk about it, and if a whole bunch of people did this, Oxide might get a bunch of real sales.

(Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)

I certainly understand that strategy generally, see also Adobe giving Photoshop licenses to students back in the day so that they'd be familiar professionally. It's just that doing so amounts to building an entirely new product, and as a relatively young startup, focus is more important. We're going deep, not wide. Someday :)

> (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)

Right now, this early: no. Sleds have compute and storage located together, so the unit of customization is currently "number of sleds in the rack" which according to https://oxide.computer/product/specifications apparently is currently three, not two, at the moment: 16, 24 or 32 sleds.

You are right that these need to be different for certain customers and workloads, we just aren't ready to support those just yet. We'll get there. Same issue, different aspect.

Until then maybe sell a few to schools to provision for student access?

A future of developers and CTOs who grew up with Oxide!

My friends and I had a small server set up in college, and those were some of the best times of those years. :D

On reading the specs, you’re using 2.91TiB U.2 drives. On the list of “oh my gosh too much engineering and too many stock keeping units,” allowing them to be swapped for the much larger U.2 devices one can buy now seems fairly easy. In case there’s a potential thermal issue, most NVMe drives I’ve checked have active power states that are a bit slower but have reduced power consumption.

But Oxide is small and shouldn’t listen to me unless a customer asks for this.

See also Cloud Foundry, where the late arrival of something devs could use on a laptop was probably key to its failure to capture the market for PaaS.

> This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales.

I get that in theory… and it makes sense most of the time. I’m not sure it does this time though. You don’t exactly “target” Oxide as an OS or platform. Rather, you use it to run VMs on. Those VMs are whatever you want. Other than that, I’m not sure what else having a home-lab version of Oxide would look like.

A different competitor to Proxmox?

People target AWS and GCP and Azure, and they write actual code that interacts with them, do test deployments there, and do real deployments there.

Right, but you need to be at a particularly high scale when you need to write code that directly interacts with a cloud provider. I can think of no use case where you are at that level that can also scale down to a home lab setup.

Yes, you can do slimmed down cloud deployments, but you're still not running the (actual) S3 or EC2 backends at home.

At most, you’re talking a K8s based deployment (for a workload that could scale up or down). But that’s also not at the level of working with Oxide directly. And I doubt Oxide wants to get into the business of selling access to their own public cloud.

can't wait to find liquidated oxide gear on ebay in 2035. all my current homelab gear is "ancient" enterprise gear like R720's etc

We'll have to wait for it to hit Groupon.

I work at a recently IPO'd tech company. Oxide was a strong consideration for us when evaluating on prem. The pitch lands among folks who still think "on prem.... ew".

Looks like a cloud like experience on your own hardware.

If only it were as cheap as dell...

As did some elements of my own company, but business risks like those are not for fledgling public companies. To be honest, right now anyone in a _public_ company advocating for it at this stage of development should have all of their decision making power removed if not outright be shown the door.

That goes double if it's your CTO...which is exactly what ended up happening with us.

I'm not saying "no, never", but clearly "no, not right now".

My company looked at them, and we were very impressed with the product. The only issue was that they are built for general compute and we really needed the option for faster processors.

It is somewhat niche, but Broadcom's purchase of VMWare now puts 0xide closer to Nutanix in that you can go buy a fully supported virtualization platform from a vendor who welcomes your business. I don't know the actual number, but it seems Broadcom is only interested in enterprise customers with huge annual spends.

With Broadcom’s plan for VMWare, Oxide certainly seems to have had excellent timing here.

Large financial institutions surprisingly are good customers for new, still-untested computing technology.

I would not get surprised if Oxide next customers were a few giant banks and funds.

In my experience, some financial institutions have a very good understanding of risk.

They are able to identify, and most importantly, quantify risk in a way that many businesses cannot.

Consequently, they're able to take risks with new hardware/software that other companies shy away from.

We have historically had private institutions with impactful research labs. Are there any of those still kicking?

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