They sell servers, what does not make sense about it? You can argue about the specific niche (big enough to run their own hardware, too small to design their own), but companies need somewhere to do compute. If nothing else, I love their approach to rethinking all of the individual software components in the stack and tossing those things which do not make sense in the modern era.
That off the shelf stuff is some Dell hardware (and fireware from 7 different venders) with some VMWare stuff on top, I can guess why somebody would go for Oxide.
They seem to sell one set of servers, that's the part that doesn't make sense.
Where is this magical company that needs exactly one rack of exactly one type of server? The vast majority of companies needing this much compute will also be interested in storage servers, servers filled with GPUs, special high-RAM nodes, etc. And at that point you'll also be using some kind of router for proper connectivity.
Why bother going for a proprietary solution from an unproven company for the regular compute nodes, and forcing yourself to overcommit by buying it per rack? Why not just get them from proven vendors?
I work for a manufacturing company that needs exactly two types of boxes, generic compute without storage that connects to a SAN, and GPU based servers.
My take: Oxide is for companies who want to buy compute, not computers.
They take the idea of "hyperconvergence" - building a software platform that's tightly integrated and abstracts away the Hard Parts of building a big virtualized compute infrastructure, and "hyperscaling" - building a hardware platform that's more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the idea of being able to design cooling, power, etc. at a rack scale rather than a computer scale. Then they combine these into a compute-as-a-unit product.
I, too, am a bit skeptical. I think that they will absolutely have the "hyperconvergence" side nailed given their background and goals, but selling an entire rack-at-a-time solution at the same time will be hard. But I have high hopes for them as it seems like a very interesting idea.
