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The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment
- tpurves 3y agoIt looks cool, what primary problem does it solve vs AWS?
- isatty 3y ago[flagged]
- mbStavola 3y agoCongrats to the Oxide team, this is a massive achievement. Now that racks are shipping it'd be awesome to see a top-to-bottom look at the hardware and software. They've given a lot of behind the scenes peeks at what they're doing via the Oxide and Friends podcast, but as far as I'm aware there is no public information on what it all looks like together.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoFor those not in the know, this is what is being talked about[1]. Congrats to the Oxide team! Would love to know what kind of uses this is being put to. In this age, everyone only talks about the cloud, with its roach motel model and all. [1] https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer
- api 3y agoThe demise of on premise and private data centers is greatly exaggerated. Few people here do that because the cloud is great for startups and rapid prototyping. Most on prem beyond small scale is big established companies. There is a minor trend of established companies reconsidering cloud because it turns out it doesn’t really save money if your work load is well understood and not highly elastic. In fact cloud is often far more expensive.
- CharlesW 3y agoFYI for language pedants like me: It’s “on-premises” or “on-prem”. A “premise” is something assumed to be true.
- lijok 3y agoWell done and congratulations to the Oxide team ! Very excited to see where this company goes
- steveklabnik 3y agoI am extremely proud of everyone at Oxide. It’s been a fantastic place to work, and finally getting to this point feels awesome. Of course, there is so much more to do… For funsies, it’s neat to look back at the original announcement and discussion from four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360
- runlevel1 3y agoAs someone who's worked on on-prem infra automation pretty much my entire career, I'm rooting for you.
- vira28 3y agoSuper excited to see more companies owning hardware vs renting (aka cloud). Somewhat related if you are interested on companies which heavily uses on-Prem check out https://github.com/viggy28/awesome-onprem https://github.com/viggy28/awesome-onprem
- pkaye 3y agoWhat operating system do they use?
- steveklabnik 3y agoA modern rack contains many computers. We use both our own lil embedded OS, Hubris, as well as our own illumos distribution named Helios. None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though. You run VMs with whatever you want.
- 71a54xd 3y agoWhy is this better than a normal k8's distribution or just buying vm's from Amazon for someone who doesn't need high security or other boutique features?
- steveklabnik 3y agoIt may be, it may not be! The main differential in those cases is that you're not owning the hardware, you're renting it. That is very important for some people, and not so much for others. It depends on what you're doing.
- slavapestov 3y agoWhy do you use Illumos?
- count 3y agoA sizable portion of their team and leadership is former Sun / Solaris / Illumos dev folks. It's their 'native' OS/platform.
- steveklabnik 3y agoMany people at Oxide have been working with it and its predecessors for an extremely long time. It is a platform that is very well known to us.
- bcantrill 3y agoOxide has been discussed on HN a bunch over the last 3+ years (e.g., [0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]), and while nothing is without its detractors, we have found on balance this community to be extraordinarily supportive of our outlandishly ambitious project -- thank you! [0] When we started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360 [1] On the Changelog podcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32037207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32037207 [2] On our embedded Rust OS, Hubris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29468969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29468969 [3] On running Hubris on the PineTime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30828884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30828884 [4] On compliance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730337 [5] On our approach to rack-scale networking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976444 [6] On our de novo hypervisor, Propolis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671447 [7] On our boot model (and the elimination of the BIOS): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33145411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33145411
- throw0101a 3y agoBe the outlandish you wish to see in the world. — Not Gandhi
- sacnoradhq 3y agoThe world is an impersonal euphemism for human culture. All things apart from physics and human nature are dentable.
- rvense 3y agoI'm not even so sure about that last one.
- bch 3y agoThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw
- nickstinemates 3y agoOxide is such an ambitious project, I am such a fan of the aesthetic and design and of course transparency of all of the cool people that work there. I'd love to have a rack or two some day!
- c7DJTLrn 3y agoI believe that good hardware and software unified into one neat package can steal customers back from the cloud. Especially in the current economic conditions where everyone's looking to save on their server bills. I hope to some day work with Oxide stuff.
- anaisbetts 3y agoCongrats to the team, but after hearing about Oxide for literal years since the beginning of the company and repeatedly reading different iterations of their landing page, I still don't know what their product actually is. It's a hypervisor host? Maybe? So I can host VMs on it? And a network switch? So I can....switch stuff?
- steveklabnik 3y agoI wrote this a while back, does that help? Happy to elaborate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
- anaisbetts 3y agoPerfect - now get that 2nd paragraph on the landing page somehow!
- wcerfgba 3y agoI don't really understand how having a larger minimum purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP. Your comments explain the emphasis on tighter integration across the stack, but it doesn't clearly show why this is a benefit. What are the problems people are having with existing systems (like Vxrail), and how does Oxide fix those? What stories are you hearing?
- throw0101a 3y ago> I don't really understand how having a larger minimum purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP. For some organizations cattle-like pizza boxes or chassis with blade systems are still not cattle-like enough. By making the management unit the entire rack you can reduce overhead (at least compared to a rack of individual servers, even if they are treated like cattle). There are vendors that will drop ship entire (multiple) racks pre-wired and pre-configured for various scenarios (especially HPC): just provide power, (water) cooling, and a network uplink.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
- greyface- 3y agoWho's the lucky customer?
- lwhalen 3y agoIs there a public price list anywhere?
- atdrummond 3y agoWhat really put me off of them (and as a fan of BCantrill and others there) is this information is highly obfuscated and I was never reached out to the two times I contacted Oxide to find out more info (both times on behalf of an org that could more than pay). Still think they’ll succeed big but I don’t think they’ve fully dialed in what is important to people who may be able to pull the trigger on a decision like this.
- dijit 3y agoSecond this, I was (and am) in a position to pay substantially for such a system and the few times I reached out was met with radio silence. possibly because I am in Europe and they want to focus on the NA market, not sure.
- bcantrill 3y agoIt is true that we are focusing on the North American market, but we are also not trying to treat the European market with radio silence; please accept our apologies! We can't find anything under your HN username or the information in your HN profile; would you mind mailing either me (my first name at oxidecomputer.com) or sales@oxidecomputer.com? With our thanks -- and apologies again!
- dijit 3y agoI will definitely reach out. likely you have me under jmh@sharkmob.com which was my corporate email address at the time. Alas, I have moved on from that job. But just so you know I am not lying.
- bcantrill 3y agoThank you so much! (And definitely viewed this as being on us not on you, so no worries!)
- sydbarrett74 3y agoAnyone willing to disclose minimum pricing? Are we talking tens of thousands? Hundreds? I hate when people say, 'If you have to ask, you can't afford it.' Please don't be that guy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brucepink 3y agoIf you compare an 0xide rack with a standard combo of Dl380s, Nexus switches, netapp filers and Vmware licences, and look at the specs page - “ 1024TB of raw storage in NVMe” - there’s no way this is tens of thousands and I’d be a bit surprised if it was in the hundreds either.
- sgt 3y agoYou're saying this rack might cost a million dollars?
- dijit 3y agoa half rack netapp filer can be a half-million dollars by itself.
- sethhochberg 3y agoI’d say there’s certainly a chance based on the specs being quoted. If we do some very rough back-of-napkin math and figure enterprise grade NVMe storage is something like $100 per TB, that’s plausibly $100k on storage drives alone
- wmf 3y agoBased on the components I'm guessing a half million.
- jamiek88 3y agoBased on the components I’d say that’s the build cost not price!
- andrewstuart 3y agoI didn’t understand the business opportunity of Oxide at all. Didn’t make sense to me. However if they’re aiming at the companies parachuting out of the cloud back to data centers and on prem then it makes a lot of sense. It’s possible that the price comparison is not with comparable computing devices, but simply with the 9 cents per gigabyte egress fee from the major clouds. If I was marketing director at Oxide I’d focus all messaging on “9 cents”.
- fbdab103 3y agoThey sell servers, what does not make sense about it? You can argue about the specific niche (big enough to run their own hardware, too small to design their own), but companies need somewhere to do compute. If nothing else, I love their approach to rethinking all of the individual software components in the stack and tossing those things which do not make sense in the modern era.
- crote 3y agoThey seem to sell one set of servers, that's the part that doesn't make sense. Where is this magical company that needs exactly one rack of exactly one type of server? The vast majority of companies needing this much compute will also be interested in storage servers, servers filled with GPUs, special high-RAM nodes, etc. And at that point you'll also be using some kind of router for proper connectivity. Why bother going for a proprietary solution from an unproven company for the regular compute nodes, and forcing yourself to overcommit by buying it per rack? Why not just get them from proven vendors?
- hhh 3y agoI work for a manufacturing company that needs exactly two types of boxes, generic compute without storage that connects to a SAN, and GPU based servers.
- bri3d 3y agoMy take: Oxide is for companies who want to buy compute, not computers. They take the idea of "hyperconvergence" - building a software platform that's tightly integrated and abstracts away the Hard Parts of building a big virtualized compute infrastructure, and "hyperscaling" - building a hardware platform that's more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the idea of being able to design cooling, power, etc. at a rack scale rather than a computer scale. Then they combine these into a compute-as-a-unit product. I, too, am a bit skeptical. I think that they will absolutely have the "hyperconvergence" side nailed given their background and goals, but selling an entire rack-at-a-time solution at the same time will be hard. But I have high hopes for them as it seems like a very interesting idea.
- TOGoS 3y agoAnyone want to explain what the heck Oxide is? Based on the comments it sounds like a biodegradable plastic wrap?
- steveklabnik 3y agoI wrote this a while back, does that help? Happy to elaborate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
- rhinoceraptor 3y agoIt's a cloud in a rack.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoSo they reinvented the mainframe with a prettier exterior? Their own OS: Check Big tall box: Check Expensive: Check (well no price list i have seen so far) Proprietary hardware at least interfaces. (?) upgrades must be bought from the vendor (?) Right to repair?
- crote 3y agoNot quite. A traditional mainframe is highly integrated, to the point of allowing hotswapping of CPU and memory. Oxide seems to be a fairly standard collection of x64 hardware, with a proprietary management software sauce.
- steveklabnik 3y agoJust to expand slightly, "proprietary" in the sense of "built by us for this computer," but not in the way that free or open source software developers speak of the word "proprietary," the vast majority of what we do is MPL licensed, to the degree that it is actually possbile.
- lytedev 3y agoOut of curiosity, is there a list of those things that can not ot could not be licensed thusly and why?
- bcantrill 3y agoIn some cases, it's derived work of open source but non-MPL'd code -- but the ones that Steve is referring to are where we have third-party proprietary firmware. There aren't a ton of these (and in almost all cases, we ourselves don't have source code). We have (naturally) tried to minimize these, but as a concrete example: every AMD CPU has a PSP that runs proprietary software; we deliver that as a binary blob given to us by AMD (it's delivered over SPI to the host CPU).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- siliconc0w 3y agoFrom a commodity hardware perspective I'm not sure there is much to be excited about but if it's a meaningful better and cost competitive IaaS maybe that is exciting. Also you are probably going to want GPU support which may be hard with their super customized offering. If I were to do a bare metal deployment I'd look at kubernetes + kubevirt + a software defined storage provider. Then you get a common orchestration layer for VMs, containers, or other distribute workloads (ML training/inference) but don't need to pay the Vmware Tax and you'd be using a common enough primitive that you can move workloads around to 'burst' to the cheapest cloud as needed.
- riking 3y agoyou can just follow one of the "kubernetes on ec2" guides and adapt it to their apis
- osti 3y agoDoes oxide provide some sort of management software like openstack on top of the hardware?
- steveklabnik 3y agoYou interact through the rack via an API, yes. I hesitate to say "like openstack" because these sorts of systems are huge, complicated, and what "like" means depends on you know, what you use. But you do get management software, yes.
- grrdotcloud 3y agoThat's everything they do I do believe.
- dataangel 3y agoSomebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply impractical. * You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud. * Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch. * AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch. * Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here. * Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups. So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now. I don't get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with VC money?
- dcre 3y agoIt is simply false that everything has gone cloud. The whole argument falls down on the first premise. Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them.
- elishah 3y ago> Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them. This strikes me as at least as much of a leap as "everything has gone cloud." Containers are... kind of a thing. And while there certainly are use cases for VMs over containers, they're comparatively niche. This product seems as if it'd be a better fit for every real use case I've ever seen if it were a prebuilt kubernetes cluster rather than a prebuilt VM hypervisor.
- samcat116 3y agoThis is super cool. I realize a lot of HN folks might not see the point of this, but it literally saves an entire team of people for companies.
- ultra_nick 3y agoServers with high quality software integration. These provide the same value to businesses as Apple devices provide to consumers. Hopefully they "just work" and eliminate a bunch of Devops distractions. Most hardware companies have terrible software. If Oxide can handle manufacturing and logistics, then they'll be huge in about 10 years.
- Devasta 3y agoI'm convinced that if anything is going to reverse the migration to the cloud, it's Oxide. Is there anything in the works for using some of this in a homelab? Mainframes (unofficially) have Hercules, be good to see something similar for folks who want to experiment.
- syntaxing 3y agoMaybe I’m misunderstanding the product but wouldn’t hypervisor do the same thing for homelab related stuff? You’ll have to provide your own hardware but shouldn’t be that difficult.
- silisili 3y agoIn what manner? The vast majority of companies I don't think need or want an entire rack. So this has to be targeted more at F500, or maybe even to colos?
- syntaxing 3y agoAm I standing this correctly? This is a on premise drop in replacement for your cloud service like AWS?
- anyoneamous 3y agoNot unless you have strictly constrained yourself to using vanilla VMs and nothing else.
- rvz 3y agoAs long as it encourages on-premise self-hosting, this can only be a good thing.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y agoI LOVE how these guys unit test hardware sub systems before putting them onto whole motherboards.
- faitswulff 3y agoHow do they do that?
- bcantrill 3y agoA great question! You can find more details on our approach in our Oxide and Friends episode on the power of proto boards.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-power-of-proto-boards https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-power-o...
- faitswulff 3y agoThanks much!
- bastawhiz 3y agoThe On the Metal podcast had been one of my absolute favorites. It's clear these folks are exceptional, and they deserve congratulations!
- ilaksh 3y agoIf I were rich, I would try to buy some big clusters like that now but only if they were full of MI300Xs (and some MI300As). May ten or twenty deadly cabinets. Then (ideally) train a record-breaking multimodal model and (hopefully) take over the planet before they all become obsolete in 2-3 years after tinygrad puts out their ASIC design and Intel and SiFive adapt it for 2nm. I guess to be truly turn-key it would need to come with a special model or two adept at training and commanding an army of LLM agents.
- barelyusable 3y agoI'd not mind frying some meats on a grill and celebrating, if anyone in Bay Area is interested. Having some Oxide folks would be awesome.
- mimd 3y agoThe listed items are for last gen CPUs and 2 gen old nics (100 Gb/s). Also zfs rather than ceph. It's hard to consider under those constraints. Any plans for upgrades beyond single rack deployments and newer gen hardware? And what is the sell case over kube, mesos, or VMware, especially since the hardware and software appear tightly coupled?
- sixdonuts 3y agoCongratulations on your release! Great product. This will totally fill our MANY on-premise CI, Security, analytics and Video needs that CANT be moved to the cloud. Oxide will definitely be on our short list for our next hardware/software stack refresh.