Rooting for this team -- just wish i could afford one of these racks... =)
I think it brings an interesting point actually.
"Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need, but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes.
((controversial take warning))
Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86 boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of cheap x86 hardware meant that the lions share of development happened on them.
People could throw a pentium 2 PC in a corner and have it serving web traffic, and when things started growing too much you could add more P2 machines or even grab a Xeon 4socket machine later down the line.
This isn't possible with mainframes, and thus, people largely don't mess with them.
The annoying thing is that this kind of problem has some kind of stickiness effect. If you need a server, and then another, you buy them as you need them and if you're already 20 pizza boxes in; it's a pretty big ask to rip them all out and moving to a different vendor entirely than staging replacements one after another.
So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors?
I don't think I've worked for any of those.
(FD: I'm actually a fan of the Oxide team, and the concept, and I would buy into the ecosystem except I have needs that are at most 3 servers at a time)
Companies do modernization/migration projects from time to time; I guess one way to solve the audience issue is to find companies that have such a planned event and try to market a “better” alternative.
While I’m also a fan of Oxide; my primary concern is whether they can actually get companies to ignore the marketing that comes out of cloud services.
Also, I'm given the impression that Oxide prioritizes user experience - their website shows off a clean UI and they presumably have modern, easy-to-use APIs. Mainframes, in contrast, seem like a whole different world - if I convinced my company to move to a mainframe, who would even operate it? I know modern mainframes are closer to "normal" servers than their old reputation, but still, I'd imagine it's pretty esoteric stuff, and IBM is famous for not being the cheapest to work with.
I do find it pretty funny that their business model seems to be reinventing mainframes, but I feel like there are important distinctions too. Hopefully they do well (I'd also love to have access to this stuff, but yeah, same "needs that are at most 3 servers" deal).
The market is complex. Those who will buy will be those who find that the existing ying doesn’t snap perfectly into their own business’ yang. They’ll be at the margins first (the post references a lab for instance, not a booming tech company), then over time less so.
They can migrate to an Oxide "cloud" without too much difficultly as opposed to procuring, installing, and maintaining the rube goldberg machine you mentioned.
They also attract interest among the "we don't want to touch cloud" organizations where trying out $1M in hardware is a rounding error, but I don't know how much traction they'd end up getting.
People coming back from the cloud is a future growth market, but there is plenty of non-cloud stuff in many places.