> Proxmox and a full rack of Supermicro gear would not be as sophisticated, but end result is pretty much the same, with I imagine far far better bang for buck.

I think the question is how well they can do the management plane. Dealing with the "quirks" of a bunch of grey box supermicro stuff is always painful in one way or another. The drop shipped, pre-cabled cab setups are definitely nice but that's only a part of what Oxide is doing here. No cables and their own integrated switching sounds nice too (stuff from the big vendors like UCS is closer to this ballpark but also probably closer to the cost too).

I suspect cooling and rack density could be better in the Oxide solution too, not having to conform to the standards might afford them some possibilities (although that's just a guess, and even if they do improve there these may not be the bottlenecks for many).