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> One thing I don't get is the target market. Who is it? Fortune 1000, government. Large organizations that want to own their own hardware, yet want the cloud experience for deploying their software to it. First two customers to have received racks are Idaho National Lab, a Department of Energy laboratory, and a global finances firm. I think that gives a characterization to at least part of the market. > They won't do this for me? You are correct that they will do that for you. There are big differences though. From a hardware level, the largest one is that what you'll get in that case are individual 1U servers, in a rack, built from a bunch of reference designs, pieced together from various different organizations. We designed this as a whole rack. From scratch. This has a number of benefits, like for example, we use 80mm fans, at a very low RPM. Our fans draw less power and operate more quietly than the usual fans you'd get in that case. (I know you said people don't care about noise, and it's true that it's not a feature of the product to sell, just an interesting aspect of the design process: we didn't set out to make the rack quiet, it just is, thanks to other decisions that are more meaningful, like cooling efficiently) On the software side, we have written an enormous amount of software from scratch, designed for this specific hardware. Including a control plane, so you can think of the whole rack as a pool of resources, not as individual servers you manage yourself. And since we have done all of this in-house, we can take responsibility for the full quality of the product. If you have a firmware bug, it's not "oh sorry, we'll file a ticket with our firmware vendor and let you know when that's sorted," we will fix it ourselves. Everything is integrated and works together, because we built it for purpose that way, not because we installed a bunch of things from different organizations, ran some test, and said "looks good to me." |