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by EvanAnderson 974 days ago
Even just a medium business offering would be great. I'd love to not have to use Dell or HP gear-- anything to get away from the cobbled-together stack of legacy IBM PC compatibility and third-party ODM/OEM stuff glue-and-taped together by the vendor.
2 comments

I am missing how AWS/GCP/Azure does not solve this for you.

Price point?

On prem. Reliable and inexpensive network connectivity they has any resemblance to a 10G LAN doesn't exist where I am.

I work with some businesses who need very, very reliable, high-bandwidth, and low latency connectivity to their data. The amortized cost of on-prem beats the cost of any off-prem offering as soon as the cost of the necessary connectivity is factoted-in.

AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.
I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.
You can use EBS Local Snapshots, can't you? It stores in your Outpost S3 storage.
Isn't that exactly what this Oxide rack is for?

Your not going to find any serious hardware product with reliability guarantees, in writing, for much less than half a million anyways.

I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.
I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time.

That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.

This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
This sounds like Synology to me.