I still don't get Oxide's offering. Anyone care to give me the skinny?
Server racks which are vertically integrated and provide great cooling, are quiet, and fully vertically integrated software (including bootloaders, hypervisor, etc. -- no BIOS!).
This includes everything from the rack itself to the PDU/switch/BMC, to the actual server blade and its chassis.
All presented in a nice package to give you a on-prem cloud-like experience.
I think this blog covers it pretty well:
https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer
Basically they sell a pre-assembled rack of compute, storage and networking with their own open source management software to build on-premise clouds.
They are selling you a rack of computers instead of a single computer, with well integrated high speed connection, storage, power, and cooling.
Looks like a mainframe computer and their selling point is that the operating system is open source.
I have no idea why you'd buy that over any of the more established players that have a proven track record of being able to support these multi-million dollar machines for many years.
I wrote this back in 2022 when I worked there, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324