Enterprise CIO doesn’t want a hobby project (attempting to cobble together internal cloud orchestration and infra), they want to be able to show immediate business value. You charge what the market will bear. I’ve seen many companies with thousands of employees and spending millions, even tens of millions a month, on public cloud providers and just flail, unable to get to steady state post transformation (even after years of trying). This is made for those folks, especially with Broadcom having VMware self inflict harm on itself with recent strategy decisions.
“Write check. Cloud up.”
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It's going to depend on how well they manage to pull off the magic trick of "little or no configuration and maintenance required". If things start breaking in hard to diagnose ways, it's going to be just another broken appliance that requires expensive maintenance, and companies will be questioning why they didn't DIY it in the first place.
You are also paying for a bunch of stuff you don't need. Most people just don't need to hot swap a CPU or turn these single socket 128 core machines into a gigantic 4096 machine either.
Simply moving virtual machine off and restarting or replacing a sled is enough for the waste majority of use-cases.
This is still pretty much commodity single socket server platforms, just with more sane and open firmware and a sane open source software stack.
For example "3.2TB Enterprise NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U.2 Gen4 with carrier" is $3,301.65 each, and you'd need 10 of those to match the Oxide storage spec -- already above the $30k total price you quoted. Similarly, "128GB LRDIMM, 3200MT/s, Quad Rank" was $3,384.79 each, and you'd need 8 of those to reach the 1TiB of memory per server Oxide provides.
With just the RAM and SSD cost quoted by Dell, I get to $60k per server (x16 = $960k), which isn't counting CPU, power, or networking.
I agree these costs are way way way higher than what I'd expect for consumer RAM or SSD, but I think if Oxide is charging in line with Dell they should be asking at least $1MM for that hardware. (At least compared to Dell's list prices -- I don't purchase enterprise hardware either so I don't know how much discounting is typical)
Edit: the specific Dell server model I was working off of for configuration was called "PowerEdge R6515 Rack Server", since it was one of the few I found that allowed selecting the exact same AMD EPYC CPU model that Oxide uses [1]
[1]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-poweredge-servers/power...
That’s the pricing for people who don’t know to ask for real pricing — it’s an absolute joke. I don’t know how might extra margin gets captured here, but it’s a lot.
Even in teeny tiny volumes, Dell will give something closer to real pricing, and a decent heuristic is that it’s at least 2x cheaper.
This is a real SSD. Dell likely buys this brand and others:
https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/NVMe/30.72TB/KIOXIA/KCMY1RU...
Yes, that is almost an order of magnitude cheaper per TiB. If you buy from a sketchier vendor, you’ll get all the way to 10x :)
