Right, my apologies for downplaying it. That you control both the hardware and the software through the entire stack has tremendous benefit, especially for this type of customer. My point was if you as a customer don't value that aspect of Oxide's pitch, which you obviously are much better at fully conveying, then you'd be seriously considering Dell/HPE/Supermicro as well.
For what it's worth the last time I had to procure a small cluster the offer Dell made was ridiculously overpriced, didn't meet the specifications I asked for, and the whole experience didn't inspire confidence in the software they were pitching either. We were a small underfunded startup so we were never gonna drop 200k on that storage solution (0.5PB HDD + ~80TB SSD), but if we did have that kind of budget we probably would have gone with one of the smaller but more focused parties there instead like maybe TrueNAS, I bet there's a beautiful market for Oxide as well in that segment.
For what it's worth the last time I had to procure a small cluster the offer Dell made was ridiculously overpriced, didn't meet the specifications I asked for, and the whole experience didn't inspire confidence in the software they were pitching either. We were a small underfunded startup so we were never gonna drop 200k on that storage solution (0.5PB HDD + ~80TB SSD), but if we did have that kind of budget we probably would have gone with one of the smaller but more focused parties there instead like maybe TrueNAS, I bet there's a beautiful market for Oxide as well in that segment.