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The holistic design is certainly a big piece of it. While we certainly admire aspects of both Apple and Sun (and we count formerly-Apple and formerly-Sun among

The holistic design is certainly a big piece of it. While we certainly admire aspects of both Apple and Sun (and we count formerly-Apple and formerly-Sun among our employees), we would also differentiate ourselves from both companies in critical dimensions: - Oxide is entirely open where Apple is extraordinarily secretive: all of our software (including the software at the lowest layers of the stack!) is open source, and we encourage Oxide employees to talk publicly about their work. - Oxide is taking a systems approach where Sun sold silo'd components: I have written about this before[0], but Sun struggled to really build whole systems. For Oxide, we have made an entire rack-level system that includes both hardware and software: the abstraction to the operator is as turn-key elastic infrastructure rather than as a kit car. We have tried to take the best of both companies (and for that matter, the best of all the companies we have worked) to deliver what customers want: a holistic system to deploy and operate on-premises infrastructure. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

jjav 3y ago
Oxide is the only exciting and refreshing technology product company I know of today. I've been rooting from the sidelines for years now, I want Oxide to succeed wildly so I can hopefully be a customer at some point.
noisy_boy 3y ago
Thanks for the perspective. That begs the request (and this despite your point about everything being open source) - you guys should share the differentiating highlights of the monitoring gains you have achieved from this level of integration - it'll help those who are not able to dive into the source code and extract/summarize this aspect. I think it'll be a good showcase to everyone else of the additional benefits that come out of this approach.
- bcantrill 3y ago
  Yes, good idea! In terms of monitoring, we have made component selection that allows for monitoring (e.g., PMBus for power rails) -- and then built the software into our SP that pulls that information and makes it available upstack via our management network.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE_9zsAadE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE_9zsAadE

jjav 3y ago

Oxide is the only exciting and refreshing technology product company I know of today. I've been rooting from the sidelines for years now, I want Oxide to succeed wildly so I can hopefully be a customer at some point.

noisy_boy 3y ago

Thanks for the perspective. That begs the request (and this despite your point about everything being open source) - you guys should share the differentiating highlights of the monitoring gains you have achieved from this level of integration - it'll help those who are not able to dive into the source code and extract/summarize this aspect. I think it'll be a good showcase to everyone else of the additional benefits that come out of this approach.

bcantrill 3y ago
Yes, good idea! In terms of monitoring, we have made component selection that allows for monitoring (e.g., PMBus for power rails) -- and then built the software into our SP that pulls that information and makes it available upstack via our management network.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE_9zsAadE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE_9zsAadE