4 ms·

What operating system do they use?

by pkaye 3y ago

steveklabnik 3y ago
A 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
    It 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 ago
  Why do you use Illumos?
  - count 3y ago
    A sizable portion of their team and leadership is former Sun / Solaris / Illumos dev folks. It's their 'native' OS/platform.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Many 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.
    - xorcist 3y ago
      I truly and honestly hope you succeed. I know for certain that the market for on-prem will remain large for certain sectors for the forseeable future. However. The kind of customer who spends this type of money can be conservative. They already have to go with on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in the same market segment uses. Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here? Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid it's being stretched a lot.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        > I truly and honestly hope you succeed. Thanks! > However. Yes. These things are challenges, but that doesn't mean they're insurmountable. I am confident that we can overcome them. > Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here? I am not in enterprise sales, so I couldn't tell you :) Oxide has those people, I'm not just one of them.
      - ahl 3y ago
        Your point is well-made: the status quo is safe! Introducing any new product into an organization takes both a recognition of pain and some courage. In the case of Oxide, the pain is apparent: extant systems are expensive, vendors gaslight and squabble when issues arise, these heterogeneous solutions are surprisingly brittle. This is true even when dealing with what is ostensibly the same company! Try getting Dell, VMware, and EMC to agree whether a problem is due to the server, hypervisor or SAN! In addition, app teams (i.e. the folks who deliver revenue to the business) are more productive on public cloud. They don't file tickets, they make VMs. Oxide is intended to bring the hardware, software, and interface innovations of the cloud into enterprise data centers with greater reliability and lower TCO.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nubinetwork 3y ago
  > None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though What about security updates and bug fixes? No platform is perfect, after all... Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line... would the hardware be repurposeable? Or would it just become a large paperweight?
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    > What about security updates and bug fixes? Security is an important part of the product. You'll get updates. > Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line All of the software, to the degree that we are able to, is open source. This is important precisely because you own the hardware; you as a customer deserve to know what we put on it.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    People who buy systems like this lifecycle it out after 5 years. Somewhere around year three they are working on specs for its replacement.
    - nubinetwork 3y ago
      You would think so, but we have several SANs at dayjob that are coming up on 10 years old...
- mindentropy 3y ago
  Pardon my knowledge but isn't this the same as what is being done on the IBM Z Mainframe?
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    In some sense, but not in others. This is an x86 box.
    - mindentropy 3y ago
      Hmm. So why will someone go with Oxide over IBM?
      - throwawaylinux 3y ago
        This is a cluster of commodity machines, a mainframe is one machine. The mainframe is optimized for reliability and compatibility foremost and does things that are quite unlike most other classes of machines even "high end servers", including RAIM (RAID for memory), and the ability to stop a failed processor and move its checkpointed state to another processor and resume it transparently from software point of view, and generally employing quite hardened circuits and strong error detection and correction throughout the system. There are some guesses at $500k for this Oxide rack, not sure if that even gets your phone call returned for a low end mainframe with much less compute power and memory installed. High end configurations rumored to be many millions. This thing is more a competitor to "scale-out" / "cloud" / "webscale" / etc., at least on the hardware front (they seem to do a lot more on software/firmware side than typical such hardware vendors).
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        I explained that (I hope) over here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

What operating system do they use?

by pkaye 3y ago

What operating system do they use?

A 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  It 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 ago
Why do you use Illumos?
- count 3y ago
  A sizable portion of their team and leadership is former Sun / Solaris / Illumos dev folks. It's their 'native' OS/platform.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Many 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.
  - xorcist 3y ago
    I truly and honestly hope you succeed. I know for certain that the market for on-prem will remain large for certain sectors for the forseeable future. However. The kind of customer who spends this type of money can be conservative. They already have to go with on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in the same market segment uses. Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here? Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid it's being stretched a lot.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      > I truly and honestly hope you succeed. Thanks! > However. Yes. These things are challenges, but that doesn't mean they're insurmountable. I am confident that we can overcome them. > Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here? I am not in enterprise sales, so I couldn't tell you :) Oxide has those people, I'm not just one of them.
    - ahl 3y ago
      Your point is well-made: the status quo is safe! Introducing any new product into an organization takes both a recognition of pain and some courage. In the case of Oxide, the pain is apparent: extant systems are expensive, vendors gaslight and squabble when issues arise, these heterogeneous solutions are surprisingly brittle. This is true even when dealing with what is ostensibly the same company! Try getting Dell, VMware, and EMC to agree whether a problem is due to the server, hypervisor or SAN! In addition, app teams (i.e. the folks who deliver revenue to the business) are more productive on public cloud. They don't file tickets, they make VMs. Oxide is intended to bring the hardware, software, and interface innovations of the cloud into enterprise data centers with greater reliability and lower TCO.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nubinetwork 3y ago
> None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though What about security updates and bug fixes? No platform is perfect, after all... Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line... would the hardware be repurposeable? Or would it just become a large paperweight?
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  > What about security updates and bug fixes? Security is an important part of the product. You'll get updates. > Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line All of the software, to the degree that we are able to, is open source. This is important precisely because you own the hardware; you as a customer deserve to know what we put on it.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  People who buy systems like this lifecycle it out after 5 years. Somewhere around year three they are working on specs for its replacement.
  - nubinetwork 3y ago
    You would think so, but we have several SANs at dayjob that are coming up on 10 years old...
mindentropy 3y ago
Pardon my knowledge but isn't this the same as what is being done on the IBM Z Mainframe?
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  In some sense, but not in others. This is an x86 box.
  - mindentropy 3y ago
    Hmm. So why will someone go with Oxide over IBM?
    - throwawaylinux 3y ago
      This is a cluster of commodity machines, a mainframe is one machine. The mainframe is optimized for reliability and compatibility foremost and does things that are quite unlike most other classes of machines even "high end servers", including RAIM (RAID for memory), and the ability to stop a failed processor and move its checkpointed state to another processor and resume it transparently from software point of view, and generally employing quite hardened circuits and strong error detection and correction throughout the system. There are some guesses at $500k for this Oxide rack, not sure if that even gets your phone call returned for a low end mainframe with much less compute power and memory installed. High end configurations rumored to be many millions. This thing is more a competitor to "scale-out" / "cloud" / "webscale" / etc., at least on the hardware front (they seem to do a lot more on software/firmware side than typical such hardware vendors).
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      I explained that (I hope) over here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]