I haven't worked with SuperMicro (aside from having it inside "appliance" devices that I've worked adjacent to), but I assume my experience with Dell and HP commodity servers are similar.
The thick layer of hardware contrivances necessary to maintain IBM PC compatibility is unnecessary for the task of bulk hosting of x86/x64 VMs. There's a lot of hardware and software that just doesn't need to be there.
Bare metal out-of-band management ends up being bolted-on to these "legacy" contrivances (scraping video memory for remote consoles, faking being USB peripherals). A serial console or SSH connection to a service processor would be vastly superior. I can't begin to count how many times an iDRAC "lied" to me about issues with a machine, or how many times the solution was "upgrade the iDRAC firmware and reboot it".
I have been mostly unimpressed with the quality of firmware for motherboards, baseboard management controllers, RAID adapters, NICs, HBAs, power supplies, backplanes, front panels, etc. Every new model of system or component ends up being an exercise in fear / anticipation of problems. The integrator has very little power over the firmware quality and I can be assured that if I do have a firmware-induced issue I'm many, many steps away from actually communicating with somebody who can help.
Granted, maybe if I was buying at the scale of Oxide's prospective Customers I'd have some pull with the integrators, but I'm skeptical of that, even.
Oxide is actually building computers. Putting commodity motherboards into boxes with other commodity components won't ever have the level of attention to detail and integration that Oxide can provide.
Probably not a coincidence. It would be interesting to know which ODM they partnered with for the hardware.
I've done some work with SuperMicro in the past. Some of their boards come with extensive headers and customization options right out of the box. They're also happy to work on board level customizations with the right contracts in place.
We didn't work with an ODM: the ODMs were unwilling to contemplate some of the most basic things we needed (e.g., replacing the BMC with a much lighter weight service processor, having a true root-of-trust, etc.) -- let alone the more things we wanted to do (e.g., our own switch). The compute sled and the switch are both of our own design and look nothing like what you'll find from an ODM; if you're curious in the details, we have discussed them quite a bit in our Oxide and Friends podcast.[0][1][2]
Please consider generating some sort of automated transcript from these.
I'd hope your target audience would understand the limitations of such a thing, and I'm probably not the only person who'd rather read than listen even with the obvious caveats.
(these days automated transcripts seem to be no harder to mentally fix up the errors in as I read them than "somebody typing fast on a software keyboard and suffering the inevitable tyop and autocorrupt related issues" is, though of course others' mileage may vary)
I was going for "set up some code once and don't think about it again" to maximise the odds of the idea sounding tempting.
Proofreading would set up an expectation on the part of readers that it -had- been proofread and corrected and therefore a commitment to perform a repeated "boring but important" task going forwards for whoever's doing said proofreading.
That way would likely lie either delayed transcripts or never getting to initial activation energy to provide anything at all.
So I think "add a quick bit of code to your podcast publishing workflow and a CAVEAT IN BIG LETTERS" is better to do first.
If it turns out enough people care about the transcript, doing it a more labour intensive nicer way later is something they can decide, well, later.
This is pretty darn close to the "Gimlet" Compute Sleds
One 225W TDP 64-core AMD Milan CPU
1 TiB of DRAM across 16 DIMMs
12 front-facing hot-swappable PCIe Gen 4 U.2 storage devices
2 internal M.2 devices
2 ports of 100 GbE networking
Commodity servers have the same specs.
Here’s a reseller of SuperMicro servers, where you can buy similar compute on the cheap.
https://www.siliconmechanics.com/systems/servers/rackform