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Their target market is essentially private cloud space combined with turnkey rack space - a pretty common on-premise setup where you order not individual server

by p_l 5y ago

Their target market is essentially private cloud space combined with turnkey rack space - a pretty common on-premise setup where you order not individual servers, but complete racks that are supposed to be "plug and play" in your DC (in practice YMMV, spent a month fighting combination of manglement and Rackable mess). You can think in this case of the final product as pretty big hypervisor cluster that is delivered complete. I'll admit more than once I'd kill for that kind of product, and I suspect that the price/performance ratio might be actually pretty good. The operating system in this case is used for internal service processor bits (compare: Minix 3 on Intel ME, whatever was that proprietary RTOS on AMD's PSP, etc. etc) that help keep the whole thing running and ship shape.

_alex_ 5y ago
Bingo. My guess is this is for control plane microcontrollers
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  It is primarily being used for the root of trust as well as our service processor, aka "totally not a BMC."
- hinkley 5y ago
  Brian has also complained in interviews about how many microcontrollers are already on your motherboard and how few of them Linux really controls. It's all proprietary and god knows what's actually running in there (and how many bugs and security vulnerabilities they have). None of those are a great situation for multitenant scenarios. This doesn't have to be control plane only. It could also be IO subsystems.
  - p_l 5y ago
    That said, Oxide doesn't get as much control in hands of owner as Raptor, but Raptor doesn't provide high integration rack like that :<
ksec 5y ago
>a pretty common on-premise setup I have been wondering if it will become a thing in some cloud hosting services as well. I guess we need to see their pricing.
- p_l 5y ago
  Depending on market, I would be totally unsurprised to see some cloud providers using turnkey racks (though they might usually have nicer deals with places like quanta), and oxide could definitely strike some contracts there, though the question is how it would mesh with the existing setup

by p_l 5y ago

_alex_ 5y ago

Bingo. My guess is this is for control plane microcontrollers

steveklabnik 5y ago
It is primarily being used for the root of trust as well as our service processor, aka "totally not a BMC."
hinkley 5y ago
Brian has also complained in interviews about how many microcontrollers are already on your motherboard and how few of them Linux really controls. It's all proprietary and god knows what's actually running in there (and how many bugs and security vulnerabilities they have). None of those are a great situation for multitenant scenarios. This doesn't have to be control plane only. It could also be IO subsystems.
- p_l 5y ago
  That said, Oxide doesn't get as much control in hands of owner as Raptor, but Raptor doesn't provide high integration rack like that :<

ksec 5y ago

>a pretty common on-premise setup I have been wondering if it will become a thing in some cloud hosting services as well. I guess we need to see their pricing.

p_l 5y ago
Depending on market, I would be totally unsurprised to see some cloud providers using turnkey racks (though they might usually have nicer deals with places like quanta), and oxide could definitely strike some contracts there, though the question is how it would mesh with the existing setup