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0 pointsyardie2y ago0 comments

They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren't sure the of the business case.

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JeremyNT2y ago

> They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren't sure the of the business case.

That strikes me as being in the right ballpark, but it's going to be tough to swallow since that's the lowest level of granularity.

For most orgs you'd be left paying for a lot of excess capacity you couldn't immediately put to use as you migrate workloads in. I guess in ~4 years once you reach steady state and you're retiring / replacing these things it all works out, but if you're migrating from vmware or something else in a traditional blade/chassis world it's not like you can just wave a magic wand and move $500k worth of compute over to this thing at once.

If you're green fielding something, that's a lot of cash to sink in on compute you may not need for some time in the future. Never mind your DR site(s) also needing that much...

MichaelZuo2y ago

So the real question is whether 1 Oxide rack can outcompete 2 or 3 racks of normal commodity hardware.

Or provide enough white glove after-sales support and written guarantees to peel away low end mainframe customers at a fraction of the price.

throw0101c2y ago

> So the real question is whether 1 Oxide rack can outcompete 2 or 3 racks of normal commodity hardware.

Given their management plane/API:

* https://docs.oxide.computer/api/guides/responses

the performance may be about the same, and CapEx as well (or maybe a little higher), but OpEx could be where you make it up in large(r)-scale operations.

And space efficiency is also not to be sneezed at: for some operations DCs/compute can be place anywhere because latency is that big of a deal, but in other places you need to be close to certain things (trading), and real estate can get expensive.

aeyes2y ago

In the spec sheet it looks like they have options with 16, 24 or 32 "compute sleds" (servers?).

metadat2y ago

Aka, a blade. Except the dimension is an odd one, 2u/2.

See pictures: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfT7MHoUoAE90QZ?format=jpg&name=...

dmix2y ago

I don’t know anything about buying servers, is that expensive?

darkwater2y ago

It depends on how many servers you put in a rack. It's been years now I did this kind of work but I would say that an average rack with 20-25U in computing, 5-10 in storage and 5 in networking will cost you 300k$ easily. I'm pretty sure that Oxide will be more an Apple-esque experience, also on the price side, so a "normal" rack giving the same performances will be cheaper but if you want Oxide you are looking for other features beside the pure HW.

gorkish2y ago

At the leading edge, the configuration you just described is probably more like $800k

yardieOP2y ago

It's very expensive hardware. I think they are trying to bring TCO down on the operation side with better control plane. I work in hyperconverged systems and it's a bunch of tradeoffs. Nothing I've configured has approached $500k so their control plane and OS has to make a really good show of why this 2x expensive cabinet is better than rack and stack Dell.

Kranar2y ago

Let's just say I hope I am interpreting something incorrectly, because if 500k is the minimum price and you match it to the minimum configuration found here:

https://oxide.computer/product/specifications

Then yeah, it's ridiculously expensive.

That said compared to competitors it's in the right ballpark, but I have no idea how companies manage to spend so much money for this stuff. I am the founder of my own tech startup and I remember when I was looking at storage solutions and building out computing clusters there were companies charging absolutely insane prices.

I literally just spent about a week of my own time studying and learning as much as I could about it on my own and ended up building out my own custom solution for about 20-25% of the price these other companies were charging. I remember hearing people trying to scare me out of it saying if I did my own solution I'd need to hire full time operations people, and I'd always have to worry about things breaking and maintenance or headaches and nightmares etc...

It's been over 10 years now and absolutely no headaches, no nightmares, and very very minimal maintenance is needed.

PTOB2y ago

Tell me more!

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