Obviously different marketing copy speaks to different people. But that is referring to how, when you buy a rack from us, you don't need to put everything together and cable it all up: you pull it out of the box, plug in networking and power, boot the thing up, and you're good to go. Installation time is hours, not days or weeks, which is the norm.
"no cables no assembly just cloud" is completely misleading to any kind of people - tech or marketing or not.
When people hear cloud, it means that aspects such as electricity costs, electricity stability, Internet, bandwidth, fire protection, safety, etc etc are abstracted away.
Oxide IS on-premise, right? The website is very vague and wishy-washy.
It is on premises. You interact with the rack the same way you interact with the public cloud: as a pool of resources. The specifics are abstracted away. “Private cloud” is pretty well established terminology in this space, and that’s what we’re doing.
At this stage of the company, everyone gets a white-glove installation process. I suspect that will change over time but I don't work on that part of things, so I don't personally know the details.
Sorry to be slightly obtuse, which details are you referring to here? Help upon installation? At the moment, we are helping customers individually, yeah. But we do have a documented process we are following https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/rack-installation-... (and more on other pages there)
Ah yeah, so the "facilities" section of https://oxide.computer/product/specifications has some of these things, probably the closest we have to publicly publishing that in a general sense.
Yes I understand, but will your included service actually verify that everything is set up correctly, meets advertised parameters, and sign off on it? (Such that the customer can start using it immediately afterwards.)
Or does the customer need to take on some risk and hazard associated with installation, configuration, initial boot up, etc.?
e.g. If someone buys with the intention of using it up to X FLOPS, and the machine only delivers Y FLOPS once it's all said and done, what happens?
It’s not the area of the company I personally work on, so I don’t know those details, to be honest. We certainly make sure that everything is working properly.
I mean, we absolutely sell support. I just don't know anything about the details personally. You shouldn't take my lack of knowledge as a "no," just a "steve doesn't personally know."
To be super clear about it, this is referring to not needing to cable up all of the individual sleds to the rack upon installation. It doesn't mean that we recommend connecting a rack of compute to your data center via wifi.
This is pretty big, as someone who has deployed servers to datacenters before. Remote hands are very good at plugging in the network uplink and the PDUs. Doing a complete leaf-spine 25GbE network with full redundancy is something they are pretty much guaranteed to screw up at some point.
I wouldn't be dismissive of people telling you that the product description can be improved. My opinion is that the description of the product in this thread will outperform your site 10 to 1.
I'll try to explain, not in the spirit of being argumentative, but with the hope of being useful.
The comment you replied to was not questioning the value of integrated cabling. It was pointing out that the product description on the site does not make sense.
"Cloud computer" sounds like a server you rent from AWS. It's kind of like calling Rust "cloud compiler."
If you choose to use words that your audience doesn't understand, or even worse understands to mean the opposite of what you want them to mean, it's a good idea to explain these words immediately using conventional words with conventional meaning. The comments by throw0101a did that.
The product seems really cool, but there is no way I would've understood what it was from the website.
I understand that's what you're saying, and I understand what the parent is saying. I chose to explain what that alluded to, in case anyone in this conversation is also finding it hard to understand what is meant by that specific copy. That doesn't mean I don't understand the broader point, or that I think the website copy is perfect.
Perhaps if you don't understand what the copy means, then that is a sign that you are not the target audience, rather than that the copy is bad? From what I've gathered from reading other comments in this thread, that copy will make perfect sense to Oxide's target audience, as it uses words in a way that will be very familiar and make perfect sense to the kind of person who might make a purchasing decision for a system like this.
And for what it's worth, I don't think you need to explain what's happening to Steve, it seems to me that he understands perfectly well. To me you come across as being rather condescending and in my opinion Steve is being commendably polite in response.
