[baby_souffle]

> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this,

Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.

I am sure that supermico had something like this as well

[Melatonic]

Cisco does too and theres another hardware virtualization layer below the normal ones ( so for example you can have many virtual nics per actual nic, etc)

[casumel]

Cisco UCS! A great hardware platform, albeit quite expensive.

[XorNot]

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.

Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.

So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.

But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does is tiny.

And if you own more then 1, like an entire rack, then do you even care? Because above some scale you're just going to wheel the rack out rather then go and pull individual units.

Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).

[baby_souffle]

> Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).

Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.

Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.

[linsomniac]

You're right, even though I did have a good use-case for them. Back in 2000-~2020 I built a "boutique linux hosting" provider, and the Supermicro "Twin^2" servers really fit our use case. We were mostly serving small dedicated servers and were very price sensitive.

Loved the idea of blade servers, but they were targeted to people who needed very high compute in small footprints, and we both didn't have high compute requirements and were power/footprint constrained (we could get more power but cost/watt would go up because of cooling density).

The Twin^2 was nice because it amortized the cost of redundant power supplies over 4 machines, but didn't have the cost overhead of big backplanes or fancy layouts to get a lot of CPU+RAM in a small physical space.

Once populated a 4 node chassis was around $750/node including CPU and RAM and 2x SATA drives, it was within $100 of the price of a similar 1U server. We had around 10 cabinets in a data center when I left the company. It was, IMHO, a pretty good deal to get a dedicated box with 24x7 monitoring and sysadmin services including updates and backups at $150/mo.

[linsomniac]

Aside: we were also one of the first VM providers, I see on the Wayback Machine we were offering it in Feb 2005, predating Digital Ocean by at least 6 years. I've regretted not marketing and selling that service much more widely. It was a side project and we had a lot of irons in the fire at the time, so we didn't focus on it very much.

It was implemented with User Mode Linux, a Linux kernel ported to run under Linux instead of ported to a bare machine. A crazy idea, but it worked REALLY well. I remember finishing up the sign-up and billing software on the plane on the way to US PyCon where we announced the service, though I don't remember the year.