Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ayewo 1253 days ago
> It’d be interesting to see how Oxide fares down the road.

I have been hearing about Oxide since 2019 [1]. 3 years later, it seems they don't yet have paying customers that one can read about. And with a tag line like: "Servers as they should be" I'm inclined to ask: "Servers as they should be [by whom?]".

Is the demand for such ideal servers driven by engineers/sys admins or by businesses (i.e. businesses who are currently being served poorly by existing options in the market)?

Is the demand for such ideal servers enough to make them a sustainable business, especially with the enormous amounts they'll likely be pouring into R&D before they can bring a product to market that lives up to their ideals?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360
1 comments
bcantrill 1253 days ago
When we started the company, we knew it would be a three year build -- and indeed, our first product is in the final stages of development (i.e. EMC/safety certification). We have been very transparent about our progress along the way[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7] -- and our software is essentially all open source, so you can follow along there as well.[8][9][10]

If you are asking "does anyone want a rack-scale computer?" the (short) answer is: yes, they do. The on-prem market has been woefully underserved -- and there are plenty of folks who are sick of Dell/HPE/VMware/Cisco, to say nothing of those who are public cloud borne and wondering if they should perhaps own some of their own compute rather than rent it all.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-oxide-s...

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...

[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/more-tales-...

[4] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/another-lpc...

[5] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-pragmat...

[6] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...

[7] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...

[8] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron

[9] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis

[10] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris

link