FAQ Friday

And Pierre, famously tough in a board meeting, Pierre looks at me and says:

And I had to tell you, Pierre, I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s complicated. Why is it complicated? Why is there not a single differentiator for Oxide? Because we took a clean sheet of paper.

When we started the company in 2019, we sought to deliver the kind of innovations that the hyperscalers had developed for themselves for the mainstream enterprise. And by taking a clean sheet of paper for a rack scale design, we knew that we’d be solving many problems, not just one. The security of the system, the operability of the system, the performance of the system, the manageability, the reliability of the system, the fact that we actually have an integrated control plane, the fact that you can wheel this rack in and within minutes you’ve got this thing powered on, you’re provisioning VMs, huge differentiator.

The fact that we blind mate into a cabled back plane. There are no cables in this system. You will find customers for whom that’s a huge differentiator. The fact that this thing operates with such great power efficiency for people that are starved in their DCs and they, starved for footprint, that’s a tremendous differentiator.

The fact that this is all open source, that’s a tremendous differentiator. The fact that this is secure from top to bottom. The fact that we have written our own lowest level software for reliability. The fact that we’ve got our own integrated switch, the fact that we’ve done our own switch software, the fact that all of that makes it easy to use, easy to operate.

The differentiator for Oxide, if I had to say what the differentiator is, it is the fact that you can run cloud computing in your data center and within that are a multitude of differentiators. I’m sorry, Pierre. It is complicated.

Thanks and see you next time.