The fact that they're willing to absorb that risk is a strong signal they're solving a real problem. It's been a while since I've worked somewhere with on-prem hardware, but I remember long build-outs, unhelpful vendors: A RAID card firmware bug bricked our SAN. Our extremely expensive support contract gave us front-row seats to finger-pointing between the card manufacturer and Dell but ultimately no solution was provided to us. Our IT director, who was absolutely furious, basically had to twisted Dells arm to get them to send us replacement hardware. Whole thing was a giant fiasco.

This is the secret none of those existing vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) are willing to tell you: They have very limited technical expertise on what they sell you and outside of some specialized troubleshooting they can do, they'll defer to their vendors. The understanding is that you've got the intellectual horsepower on staff to cope with their various shortcomings.

> Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100.

If you're working for a megacorp nothing tends to happen quickly, so there will be a slow roll-out over a multi-year period as old hardware gets phased out and new hardware is brought in for a refresh.

If there's a hiccup at any point they'll simply keep the previously purchased stuff running and start a new roll-out with another vendor next fiscal.

> I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.

1. They're just starting out. 2. Some of their customers want to be (or start-out initially) discreet:

> Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-un...

> completely unsupported

That equation changes with the entire software stack being open-source

I doubt any F100 would go all-in on new vendor like Oxide for anything at first. I bet they could spend millions on a a few racks as a trial and have some groups work with it. A couple years down the line maybe they start expanding usage if they like it.

Of course that framing itself is bad - F100 companies aren't usually quite that monolithic. By the time they get that big there's a heterogeneous set of processes, equipment, systems, etc. Some parts of the company may use Oxide right away because they see it as a solution, and others may keep using the IBM mainframes, and other still will keep using racks/blade servers from Dell for eternity.

F100 waste so many millions already on projects that never see the light of day, why couldn't they throw money at Oxide and see if it works better than their AWS contract?

Dell's hyperconverged solutions did exist when the company started. We believe we can compete.

When my company looked into it VXBlock looked less like fully integrated hardware and software and more like a smattering of pre-selected components wired into a box ready to go with VMWare with a support contract. If you're already in deep with VMWare they're probably great. But the software side made my head spin. It looks like Oxide is a better fit for orgs that are more IaC.

I guess time will tell VXBlock just looks like amalgamation of SKUs Dell has. Oxide was built as "clean slate" from firmware to every minute detail to offer a compelling product for companies that want to have a hyperscaler style systems for their on-prem workloads.