How did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.

The rack were not insanely expensive, expandable so you don't have to build fully stacked racks from the beginning. Purely based on a hardware, compares to other blade systems but pricier.

The interesting part was the software, management interface, Terraform provider and how everything just fit together. Having storage, network and compute all in a single managed rack package brings a lot of value and brings down TCO. Really appreciated the security group like approach to network policies.

Unfortunately I haven't worked with HPE or Dell recently so I'm not sure what they currently offer.

You don't go to oxide for lowest cost.