[magnawave]

I guess the wildcard is price.

AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc]

Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only major difference being the "in your datacenter" part. Since you own the cost of your datacenter, Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS, but how do you do that with low volume [and from the look of it not-cost optimized, but instead fairly tank-like] bespoke hardware? Feels like the pricing / customer fundamentals are going to be pretty rough here outside perhaps a few verticals.

[kaliszad]

Oxide seems to be a lot more efficient than a rack full of 1U servers with each having 2 PSUs + 2 ToR switches + 1 management switch somewhere for all the OOBMs. All those little fans and power conversions eat a lot of power, the fans and the PSUs all cost something too. Also, have fun managing all of that in a secure manner or debugging anything at all. Once you add the VMware licensing you might end up with more or less the same cost up front and quite likely higher overall cost. And I am not even beginning to talk about racking/ stacking of the whole rack. I haven't seen much support even when Dell/EMC owned VMware and together produced the VXRail lineup and the company I used to work for was presented as the reference project in Saxony, Germany at that time. All of the boxes would add up to about 2 standard racks but it was representative of the other bigish customers in that area and time.

I imagine, some of the customers will order 1-2 racks half full and over a few years possibly add a few sleds, these will probably demand great GUI/ manual experience and possibly competitive Oracle/ SAP/ MSSQL benchmarks and I can imagine Veeam integreation. Other customers such as the DoE or some big enterprise customers will order whole rows of racks and demand perfect automation options. That is just a guess.

[sarlalian]

Datacenter costs are weird. The first big cost is having a datacenter. However once you have the space, power, cooling and that part makes sense, then the actual hardware going into it can have a pretty decent premium and still be highly competitive with AWS. It will also depend heavily on what you are doing and producing, if the answer to that is a large amount of data, and it needs to transit out of AWS, suddenly the cost of a pretty large datacenter is really cheap in comparison. AWS egress fees have a markup that will make your accountants panic. From a hardware standpoint, once you need GPU compute or large amounts of RAM, the prices get pretty dumb as well.

[jjav]

> Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS

Which should be pretty easy. I don't know the exact costs but in a previous Oxide discussion the number 1M was thrown around. If that's roughly correct, that is comfortably less than a single year of AWS bills at most startups I've been in (except the very tiny ones < 15 people).

Haven't seen any performance numbers either so admittely estimating here, but from what I know about building racks of 1U servers and knowing that Oxide is more efficient, I can believe an Oxide rack should handily outperform the AWS VMs we (the startups) were paying >>>100K/mo for.

If these numbers are anywhere in the ballpark, an Oxide rack should easily be saving quite a bit of money already by year two.