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Seems like this company has gotten a lot of hype but what so they actually do? Cloud hosting? Or selling physical servers? Both of those things sound like a ter
by smabie 4y ago
Seems like this company has gotten a lot of hype but what so they actually do? Cloud hosting? Or selling physical servers? Both of those things sound like a terrible business tho..
- stingraycharles 4y agoFrom what I gather, it’s extremely beefy, physical servers with DPUs built-in. I.e. perfect for large on-premise deployments while maintaining the high performance that DPUs enable, all as a single appliance. It’s the kind of thing I would expect Nvidia or Dell to become big at as well, and Bryan Cantrill has enough leverage to pique my interest significantly here.
- wmf 4y agoI don't think they're using DPUs.
- jjtheblunt 4y agowhat's a DPU?
- unixhero 4y agoDatacenter processing unit, it's a rather new thing
- gertrunde 4y agoAlso known as: SmartNIC, and a bunch of other names, basically a NIC with an embedded CPU (usually ARM of some sort), so can offload some workload into the NIC. An example is nvida's bluefield, there are others That sort of thing is being used in a few areas, can even run ESXi on them. There was a fun article on servethehome a while back using them to build an arm cluster (Link: https://www.servethehome.com/building-the-ultimate-x86-and-arm-cluster-in-a-box/ https://www.servethehome.com/building-the-ultimate-x86-and-a... )
- qbasic_forever 4y agoEven a cursory glance of their website or listen to the episode pretty clearly explains they're building server hardware for hyperscalers. I.e. they want to build and sell the hardware that your hosting provider would buy to host your applications. I would guess they see quite a market for on-premises computing, particularly with companies that through legal or competitive reasons cannot or do not want to lose control of their data by hosting it on a cloud service.
- ec109685 4y agoHaven’t fully grocked how this will get huge. If there is a big market here, won’t the AWS Outposts of the world win this market?
- jbnorth 4y agoDisclaimer: I work for AWS I think Outpost is a great hybrid-ish solution for those companies with workloads in AWS that want to supplement that with on-premise workloads using the same APIs and tools they are already used to. The use cases I see for Oxide are, like other have said, are for hyperscalers or hosting providers who want to have their own on-premise infrastructure that isn’t tied to another entity like AWS. Whether that’s because you have the in-house talent to manage it or for compliance reasons it’s required it does have a niche.
- swyx 4y agook so.. what exactly counts as a hyperscaler? and how many of them are there?
- mlindner 4y agoPeople who design their data centers in at least rack-sized units and ideally data center sized units, and creates custom hardware fit for that purpose. Would be my personal definition. Wikipedia has a short page with a different definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing
- wmf 4y agoIt's a private cloud rack aka hyperconverged infrastructure rack but they're allergic to standard terminology for some reason. I assume the market is cloud repatriation for startups.
- mlindner 4y agoWikipedia says that hyperconverged infrastructure typically uses commercial off-the-shelf computers. So that's likely why they're allergic to it. As they're designing their own computers so the term isn't accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-converged_infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-converged_infrastructure Oxide racks won't be able to use anything other than Oxide computers (or maybe eventually third party computers that follow Oxide standards).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]