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> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers

You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.

What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.

I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email.

This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.

Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.

Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.

Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually value.

The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.

Same here. As a teenager I dreamt about working for SUN. Oxide comes close in a way.

I already know it is out of my league, however the podcast is great to listen to.

I applied last year. But they had too many candidates apply to consider my application.

This is good news for them. I expect there will be more competition for positions there should any open up.

I really tried to like the podcast. It’s been a few years, so maybe it’s improved.

The topics were good. The guests were great.

But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests actually talk.

Bryan, if you’re listening, please let your guests talk. We have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And it’s often amusing and sometimes right.

People don’t tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you don’t get either.

After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill’s opinions about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.

Let your guests talk.

Working for them would be cool, but just getting to work with their gear would be great. I am so tired of commodity Dell x86 servers (and garbage drivers, management hardware, etc) and support technicians who have no resources to actually support the hardware (beyond telling me to update the firmware and pray).

+1 for the podcast.

I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe

Can you name some people who are working there and who you look up to? I need some new idols after the old idols all went up in MAGA and Epstein files .

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.

Total chaos.

I always felt the same every since I learnt about the company. Can't think of a more rewarding place to work at.

This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same initial thought after reading this blog post then poking through their site. The degree of careful thought put into their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a position to have that luxury (genuinely).

You should check out their podcast, Oxide And Friends

They’re players in a newish market segment called “hyperconverged,” basically “you buy a rack and it runs your workload, you don’t worry about individual systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it.”

Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.

Rack scale computing, on both the software and hardware side. That means building custom network switching, power management, etc, in a turn key solution that drops in to a customer's data center. Unbox it, plugin a few connections, make a few configuration settings, and start deploying. It's the on-prem response to the cloud for companies running things at scale.

Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.

I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.

Turn key well designed onprem private cloud.

Related question: Are services like AWS Outpost from public clouds the main competitor for Oxide?

The selling point, from the looks of it, is an on-prem cloud where you own the hardware.

For the business guys they're focusing on price and sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration bugs.

Owning instead of renting, for cost and control, without giving up the benefits of the cloud.

I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.

All of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.

Step 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.

I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a homelab user?

Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.

You can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual networking with x86_64 "sleds."

Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.

I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...

While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.

Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.

Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.

A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make.

Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.

It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management.

There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.

I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.

API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.

If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.

Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.

They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.

If they didn't buy all the RAM they needed for their near future before the prices spiked, they probably need most of the $200M just for that.

As companies grow, their capital needs actually increase, even if they are profitable.

We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don’t expect they are reliably profitable yet.

They state:

> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"

Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.

Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing their business so this could be total nonsense in their case, but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!

Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.

There is a gold-rush going on. It needs plenty of compute besides GPU's, this is definitely the time to scale as quickly as possible.

Same, I've wanted one of these things for years.

> 5 kW to work with per cabinet

have my expectations been shot by reading too much about Nvidia's latest and greatest, or does this seem quite low?

Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.

Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.

I just talk about some comments I read some time ago, so take this with a grain of salt. It was my understanding that if you were spending about $300k-$500k a year in cloud services, it would make sense this type of solution, so the expected price would be something between $500k-$1M depending on the configuration

Conversely, has Oxide discussed in depth how they see GPU compute?

I’m guessing for their current target market of existing enterprise software it doesn’t matter, but the ownership and economics stories are at least as compelling for matmul code.

You buy the physical rack and install it in your data centre. It is your property.

importantly, you don't pay for it as a service, you buy it and it's yours. like buying a cloud in a box, instead of having to build it yourself with various server, storage, networking, and software vendors it all comes ready to use.

I don't know how it works for Oxide, but this isn't a new concept, IBM has been doing it since the 1950s. Own the mainframe, pay for the required service contract.

What led you to believe that this is a SaaS offering? It's not.

The website looks good but it is very hard to know what they do exactly and what they sell, if you can be their customer or not just browsing the website. If you don't know them before.

Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.

Do you need to speculate? The post says exactly this.

I suspect it’s because VCs have trouble finding decent places to put all their money.

> and all employees literally have equal equity

In previous HN threads they said that equity was not equal for all employees.

Not equity, last I heard

How could a massively capex business like Oxide scale in the same manner that Valve did based on the current market movement of the industry that Oxide is addressing? I personally cannot see how that is at all possible. The cash required to back downstream capital in a business like this as it scales without it falling flat is surly well in excess of $6/700MM, if they manage to get by with with only selling 300/400 million of equity, that will be a great outcome for the founders.

There’s nothing confusing about it. Hardware businesses require a lot of capital to build the hardware.

Valve is primarily a software company with zero marginal cost to a game sale.

Most developers won't know if they're touching it or not, given their market.

I don't think we'd ever go with the "we don't have competitors" line, it's not serious. The competition is more AWS, GCP, and Azure than it is Nutnaix though, they can't provide a similar experience or economic value when they don't make or control their own hardware. That doesn't mean we never see Nutnaix, but it's not the most apt comparison. As Alan Kay famously said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" - otherwise you'll be stuck at the intersection of support and scaling pains long term.