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Hmm. They basically reinvented mainframes. Seems it has a lot in common with Z series. Scalable locked in hardware, virtualization, reliability, engineered f

Hmm. They basically reinvented mainframes. Seems it has a lot in common with Z series. Scalable locked in hardware, virtualization, reliability, engineered for hardware swaps, upgrades. A proprietary operating system (?) from what someone said. (Offshoot of Solaris +++ (???) By that I mean that most of it, or all of it might be open sourced forks, but it will be an OS only meant to run on their systems. (It would be fun to get it working at home, on a couple of PCs or a bunch of PIs) They lack specialized processors to offload some workloads to. Perhaps in modern terms shelfs of GPUs or a shelf fast FPGA , DSP processors. The possibilities are huge. I didn't find any mention of from what I read. They also lack the gigantic legacy effort to be compatible, which is a good thing.

zozbot234 5y ago
Their approach to reliability isn't quite on par with mainframes, AIUI. At least, not yet. And the programming model is also quite different - a mainframe can seamlessly scale from lots of tiny VM workloads (what Oxide seems to be going for) to large vertically-scaled shared-everything SSI, and anything in between.
- wd45 5y ago
  Ignoring hardware reliability, thanks to the integration, their solution should be more reliable than whatever byzantine solutions are currently used in their target market. I've worked in a shop (a well-known name that I won't mention) that had a mix of "chat ops" and Perl scripts integrated with JIRA where you could request a Linux VM through a JIRA ticket and get it automatically provisioned, I assume from some big chassis running VMWare, and then use git+Puppet to configure it. It works, but it's a lot of software from different sources and there is always one thing or the other failing. And the security of all that stuff is probably patchy, regardless of audits. That being said, this solution is the mother of all lock ins... I could see it used for the non-critical part of a company's infrastructure. I would not run production stuff on it, but it could work for development systems, test boxes, etc. Basically give developers access and let them create and destroy as many VMs as they need, whenever they need.

zozbot234 5y ago

Their approach to reliability isn't quite on par with mainframes, AIUI. At least, not yet. And the programming model is also quite different - a mainframe can seamlessly scale from lots of tiny VM workloads (what Oxide seems to be going for) to large vertically-scaled shared-everything SSI, and anything in between.

wd45 5y ago
Ignoring hardware reliability, thanks to the integration, their solution should be more reliable than whatever byzantine solutions are currently used in their target market. I've worked in a shop (a well-known name that I won't mention) that had a mix of "chat ops" and Perl scripts integrated with JIRA where you could request a Linux VM through a JIRA ticket and get it automatically provisioned, I assume from some big chassis running VMWare, and then use git+Puppet to configure it. It works, but it's a lot of software from different sources and there is always one thing or the other failing. And the security of all that stuff is probably patchy, regardless of audits. That being said, this solution is the mother of all lock ins... I could see it used for the non-critical part of a company's infrastructure. I would not run production stuff on it, but it could work for development systems, test boxes, etc. Basically give developers access and let them create and destroy as many VMs as they need, whenever they need.