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The Cloud Computer

• rwmj 3y ago
  Haven't blade computers been doing this for a while?
  • EvanAnderson 3y ago
    Sort of. The big deal with Oxide is that all the legacy compatibility with the IBM PC platform is gone, and the whole stack, top-to-bottom, is built by then (including firmware). It's not like commodity x86 gear with black-box (often buggy) firmware and layer-upon-layer of hacks and compatibility kludges to present the hardware interface of a late model IBM PC AT.
    • steve1977 3y ago
      What makes you think so? According to their website, the compute bit is based on AMD EPYC 7713P CPUs. I can buy these at my local electroncis retailer. So pretty much commodity x86.
      • nickik 3y ago
        The CPU is commodity, nothing else is. Costume Mainboard and firmware without BIOS and their own BMCish thing and their own Root of Trust. Same for their router. Standard chip, everything else is costume.
        • steve1977 3y ago
          So similar to a IBM mainframe then?
          • nickik 3y ago
            Similar in some ways different in others. But in terms of not being a PC architecture. Yes it is. But in many other ways its not at all like a Mainframe.
            • steve1977 3y ago
              I’m not sure if “not PC architecture” is really an advantage for many customers.
              • panick21_ 3y ago
                Every PC has millions of lines of firmware code that often fails and causes problems. Case and point, pretty much all hyperscalers rip out all the traditional vender firmware and replace it with their own, often partially open source. The BMC is often a huge problem, its a shifty architecture and extremely unsafe. Meta is paying for u-bmc development to have something a bit better. Doing things like rack attestation of a whole racks worth of firmware if stacked PC is incredibly hard and so many companies simply don't do it. And doing it with the switch as well is even harder. Sometimes the firmware runs during operations and takes over your computer causing strange bugs, see SMM. If there is a bug anywhere in that stack, there are 10 layers of closed source vendors that don't care about you. Costumers don't care if its PC or not, but they do care if the machine is stable, the firmware is bug free and the computer is safe and not infected by viruses. Not being a PC enables that.
              • repelsteeltje 3y ago
                It's similar to hyperscale infrastructure — it doesn't matter as long as it looks like a PC architecture from the OS running inside a VM. The layers and layers of legacy abstraction firmware, BMC, drivers BIOS, hypervisors you get with a typical on premise Dell/HP/SuperMicro/... server motherboard are responsible for a cold start lasting 20 minutes, random failures, weird packet loss, SMART telemetry malfunctions, etc. This is the type of "PC architecture" cruft many customers have been yearning to ditch for years.
                • steve1977 3y ago
      • dist1ll 3y ago
        The difference is that when you're buying a x86 system, the entire CPU bringup (incl. AMEGAS/openSIL on AMD) runs proprietary and poorly documented firmware. You're entirely at the mercy of the vendor. Oxide has put immense effort into writing open-source platform initialization code, and built their own open-source BMC/RoT solution.
        • steve1977 3y ago
          So effectively I’m at the mercy of Oxide, at least as long as their system does not become some kind of standard. Not in theory maybe, but in practice. Because as a customer, I would probably also need to put in immense effort to understand and maintain that software myself.
          • EvanAnderson 3y ago
            Their firmware is open source. You can pay whoever you want to maintain it. You can't do that with Dell, HP, Supermicro, and the unknowable rabbit hole of ODMs and sub-suppliers and contractors who actually make the hardware and firmware for these companies. Until you've dealt with a malfunctioning Dell or HP server and have to live with being told "we don't know why it acts that way, we'll try to get the ODM to repro" I don't think you can appreciate how cool Oxide's offering seems.
            • steve1977 3y ago
              If I have server under maintenance with Dell or HP, they would replace the server or component for me in such a case. Which would probably be a lot faster than trying to find someone who could maintain some non-standard firmware (as good as it might be). Even if I had to replace the server on my own cost it would probably still be cheaper. And it would be easy to replace because it's commodity hardware, that was kind of my point.
              • EvanAnderson 3y ago
                I have had experiences with tens of Dell servers with the same model NIC having the same fault. The servers were absolutely under maintenance. I fought with tech support for weeks before I was finally told it was a driver/firmware issue and that I had to work around it (and lose performance for the sake of reliability). Maybe if I had hundreds of servers Dell would have helped me out. At the scale of tens they told me to take what I got. The Customer got a lower performance solution and nobody anywhere could help them for any amount of money, short of replacing the gear. That's just a performance issue. I've heard horror stories about reliability-- All the way down to disk firmware and RAID controllers. I consider myself lucky.
      • speed_spread 3y ago
        The CPUs are x64 but the architecture is not that of a PC, there is no BIOS, etc. You couldn't boot Windows or Linux on the bare metal. The hardware, firmware and hypervisor are custom built for control, safety and observability. On top of that, the application OS all run on VMs which _do_ have a (virtual) PC architecture.
        • mwcampbell 3y ago
          To me as a casual outside observer, the fact that they're using hardware virtualization at the top of the stack, after bcantrill gave so many talks about running containers on bare metal, is the most disappointing part. They could have had unbroken control and observability from the bottom of the stack all the way to the top. They got so close!
          • speed_spread 3y ago
            It's possible that the hypervisor can reserve you a full CPU or full cores for the guest OS to work with, so you still get most of that bare metal goodness.
• benpacker 3y ago
  I know price will vary wildly based on how many you’re buying, but does anyone have the roughest ballpark for how much it would cost to buy one (1), or like two?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wg0 3y ago
    I would assume a million dollar. Ballpark.
    • Aachen 3y ago
      I mean, the raw hardware surely costs around 100k, and no way that it costs more than ten million, so you're always going to be right with that "ballpark" qualification
      • wg0 3y ago
        I vaguely remember listening to their pod cast and my impression was that it starts around 500k. Add few add ons, service contract, support etc so would be there. I want such a rack but power draw on average is listed around 12kwh. Unbelievable.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • yardie 3y ago
    They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren't sure the of the business case.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      So the real question is whether 1 Oxide rack can outcompete 2 or 3 racks of normal commodity hardware. Or provide enough white glove after-sales support and written guarantees to peel away low end mainframe customers at a fraction of the price.
• tgtweak 3y ago
  Kick ass project, been following bcantril since before Joyent and as a (server/infra + sysadmin nerd this really hits home): Are there plans to build some public-cloud-esque software add-ons to offer cloud-native equivalents to s3, serverless-functions, message queues, etc? I feel like the "running your own datacenter" complexity of on prem is a big part of why companies go to the cloud in the first place - but that a good amount of cloud lock-in is actually in the software/service stack and reliance on it. I know there is a competent open source option for most of these services (and in fact most are repackaged open source software...), but they do seem pretty disparate and require quite a fair bit of knowledge and expertise to deploy and run at scale. Secondary question in the same thread: What about "accounting"? Running infrastructure at large-scale companies (such that would look at a rack-level solution) usually entails budgeting and accounting of resources - how does oxide simplify this for infrastructure ops trying to keep the various IT consumers honest?
  • bcantrill 3y ago
    Great questions. We are careful about new service exposure -- object storage certainly makes sense (though having built one in the past, very mindful about trade-offs between cost/performance/availability/durability) but some higher level services may not (do not expect an Elastic Beanstalk equivalent!). There's a big gray area in the middle, where we will be customer- and demand-driven. On accounting: yes! This is something that we have designed abstractions for from the start with respect to tenancy with our silo and project abstraction[0], and we are actively adding resource allocation and monitoring; stay tuned! [0] https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/key-entities-and-concepts https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/key-entities-and-concepts
• talent_deprived 3y ago
  I can't read the dark theme for more than a couple of minutes without a headache and eye strain starting up.
• slowhadoken 3y ago
  “The cloud” has been a buzzword for twenty years but I feel like it’s finally taking shape. This is promising.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• joby_surge 3y ago
  Sooo basically it's an OSS version of Egenera's BladeFrame or VCE's vBlock. It's going to be tough sledding getting these into enterprise accounts. Best of luck.
• tomerbd 3y ago
  Can someone 0lease explain whatnis this and why do i need this?
• tomerbd 3y ago
  Can someone 0lease explain what is this and why do i need this?
• moondev 3y ago
  Since bhyve can't do nested virtualization, i guess they can't "dog food" the platform during development. I wonder if for that they use Linux. The same hardware and software using kvm would be much more appealing. Not being able to run nested virt or GPUs on such a powerful and expensive rack is pretty brutal. Perhaps that is planned for the future though.
• methods21 3y ago
  the incarnation of what VBlock was supposed to be?
• up2isomorphism 3y ago
  IT is a fashion industry.
• XorNot 3y ago
  Is this a big deal? I clicked on this skeptically, but...it actually seems like kind of a big deal? It is at least technically impressive, since it seems like they're eliminated a ton of datacenter pain points with the mechanical design.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    It sort of reminds me of a Dell blade chassis that I pulled out of a DC last year - it was pretty impressive tech that I hadn't dealt with. 6 power supplies that I think could take 110v or 220v, but you needed 220v for full capacity. All of them were hot-swappable and as long as you had 3 powered it would keep running. The compute sleds were modular and it also had integrated networking as mentioned in this article. All obviously crafted to a very high standard; even the plastic fan cages felt premium (and I'm told it cost accordingly back in 2010 or so). Also a former employer who was a bit below the hyperscaler level also had what they called "roll-in racks", though I believe they were just taking standard servers and networking gear and integrating them somewhere (presumably with cheap labor) and then bringing them into the DC as needed. So I don't think it's a particularly new concept, but I agree it looks like it has some potential as a product.
  • roland35 3y ago
    Oxide is a bit of a darling child on HN - I think a lot of people (myself included) find it interesting that they are trying to re-engineer something somewhat commoditized and boring (servers) into something cool
  • deadfece 3y ago
    It seems like they have managed to fit 32 1P servers in a 42U rack. That's pretty impressive, I have to admit. I don't think I've seen that level of density before.
    • steve1977 3y ago
      32 1P servers in a 42U rack is impressive? If you use 1U servers, they would only use up 32 units, leaving with 10 units for storage and networking. Also, I remember for example HP BladeCenter BL20p systems. There you would have up to 8 or 16 servers per 6 rack units IIRC. So about 56 to 112 servers in 42U. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPE_BladeSystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPE_BladeSystem
• cpursley 3y ago
  Can somebody explain in a sentence or two what this actually is and what the benefits are?
  • gmaster1440 3y ago
    Modern tech stack for managing data centers using tightly integrated hardware and software.
    • mickeyp 3y ago
      Like Dell and Bladelogic used to be? Or VMWare ESXi and friends? Or...
      • EvanAnderson 3y ago
        I'd say more like Sun, or DEC, at least in terms of the hardware. The software is Free, which wasn't the case with those older companies.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    Weird there’s no mention of GPU at all when you’d think that’s what would prick up the ears of the hosting companies ….. stack a pile of GPUs in a rack, surely you can sell time on that. The Oxide machines seem to be aimed at 2020.
    • axelthegerman 3y ago
      This seems to be around selling the whole piece of hardware not just "time on that". That being said I'd still expect a monthly service fee for networking, electricity and service in general.
    • 7thaccount 3y ago
      I don't think they're trying to be AWS. They're trying to sell a product that greatly simplifies doing on-site cloud for companies. So they sell the physical hardware/software bundle and not time.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  I wonder how effective AMD 7840 would be as a cloud CPU. 8 cores, fast GPU, AV1 video encoder. Tiny SBC machines …. you could probably stack a bunch of them in a rack. https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4-7840U-1U https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4-7840U-1U https://youtu.be/WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=zMYn2Gf3vTe-qMl8 https://youtu.be/WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=zMYn2Gf3vTe-qMl8 https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-7840u https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-7840u
  • wmf 3y ago
    "Microserver" designs have failed several times. AMD Epyc is basically twelve 7840s in an even smaller space and you can partition it any way you want.
• fefe23 3y ago
  This is actually a pretty big deal. They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source. So no "sorry but the third party vendor dropped support for the bios". You get the source code. Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch. Ironically this looks like the realization of Richard Stallman's dream where users can help each other if something doesn't work.
  • throw0101a 3y ago
    > They sell servers, but as a finished product. They sell rack-as-compute.[0] Their minimum order is one rack: You plug in power and network, connect to the built-in management software (API), and start spinning up VMs. [0] With built-in networking and storage.
    • steve1977 3y ago
      So just hyperconverged infrastructure with a cute name?
      • danpalmer 3y ago
        “Just” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. This achievement is clearly worth a lot to people.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • throw0101a 3y ago
        With rack- and multi-rack-level management of all your hardware infrastructure (including networking and storage, along with VMs) using an API: * https://docs.oxide.computer/api/guides/responses https://docs.oxide.computer/api/guides/responses
• dewey 3y ago
  I always thought it's just about the hardware but it seems like it also includes it's own kind of virtualization / provisioning interface for VMs, firewalls and also an overview over running software. Does this "lock" you into the Oxide platform and you just buy into the whole thing instead of buying some server from Dell, then running some Proxmox like software and a Docker host?
  • depr 3y ago
    You run VMs on their platform, so it doesn't lock you in more than any cloud host locks you into their provisioning interface.
  • wpm 3y ago
    The VMs are bhyve on illumos. They're about as hard to move off as moving a datacenter sized Proxmox cluster to anything else.
• api 3y ago
  I saw a demo from them and it looked nice but then they told me they are stopping at the VM and storage blob level of abstraction. Virtually all the value we get from cloud is in their managed offerings of complex and difficult to admin systems like Kubernetes, Postgres, and managed storage layers. That’s where all the value is but it’s also where all the cost is. If you just want compute, storage, and bandwidth all those can be had at commodity prices. Look at Hetzner, Hivelocity, FDCServers, DataPacket, OVH, or VPS providers like Vultr. You can get dozens of cores, terabytes of SSD, and gigabits of unmetered bandwidth for a few thousand dollars or less. It’s very cheap. Without the high level managed stuff we would be off cloud five minutes from now. I’m sure there is a market for this among people who run on premise data centers, but I think they would have a much larger market if they went further up the software stack. Right now they just look like they are competing with Dell and Supermicro, not Amazon or Google Cloud.
• weystrom 3y ago
  > Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location. Man I would love to work for a company like that. I don't know why more people don't set their startups like that.
  • keepamovin 3y ago
    Exactly, man! That's the way it should be done. It's not a company's business to decide how much your life should cost. It's its business to reward you for the value you provide, and that value is not tethered to your location, so neither should be your salary!
    • dewey 3y ago
      This really is one of these things where every employee in a cheap cost of living area will say "Exactly, man!" and people in an expensive area will see it differently because it might cap them lower than what they could get. I always find that a very naive point of view, of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side, who wouldn't. But I'm also aware that this is not how the world works in reality, there's different tax systems, different expense costs and we don't live in a global one-market world. I find the strategy of defining different "zones", like most of the remote first / salary transparency companies much more realistic.
      • throw0101a 3y ago
        > This really is one of these things where every employee in a cheap cost of living area will say "Exactly, man!" and people in an expensive area will see it differently because it might cap them lower than what they could get. Well the co-founders live in the Silicon Valley area, with their physical HQ being in Emeryville: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeryville,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeryville,_California
        • dewey 3y ago
          Early stage VC-backed startup compensation is very different from later stage companies or bootstrapped companies. It's very common for founders or early employees to receive a lower salary and receive equity instead.
• jpdb 3y ago
  I really wish oxide had a Homelab/consumer centric offering! Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3/4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds. I have thought about building one myself, but it's a large investment of time that I can't seem to find lately.
  • EvanAnderson 3y ago
    Even just a medium business offering would be great. I'd love to not have to use Dell or HP gear-- anything to get away from the cobbled-together stack of legacy IBM PC compatibility and third-party ODM/OEM stuff glue-and-taped together by the vendor.
    • siscia 3y ago
      I am missing how AWS/GCP/Azure does not solve this for you. Price point?
      • EvanAnderson 3y ago
        On prem. Reliable and inexpensive network connectivity they has any resemblance to a 10G LAN doesn't exist where I am. I work with some businesses who need very, very reliable, high-bandwidth, and low latency connectivity to their data. The amortized cost of on-prem beats the cost of any off-prem offering as soon as the cost of the necessary connectivity is factoted-in.
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          Isn't that exactly what this Oxide rack is for? Your not going to find any serious hardware product with reliability guarantees, in writing, for much less than half a million anyways.
          • EvanAnderson 3y ago
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  I'm a bit confused about them calling it a cloud computer. The primary benefit of cloud is you spend opex instead of capex. Isn't this moving back to capex again?
  • subarctic 3y ago
    Ya, in the past the messaging was more like "get the ergonomics of the cloud with the economics of owning your own hardware", I think it's confusing to just call it a "cloud computer"
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      Yes - that makes loads more sense to me. It's cool that you can spin stuff up and it's all integrated with the hardware - having seen fairly large VMWare installations and all the faff it takes to make them work, this seems really useful. I just don't think it's the same as the cloud, and the article seems to discount the main reason for the cloud: opex, letting you get started (and stopped) quickly and cheaply.
      • subarctic 3y ago
        I might have the wrong idea of what these terms mean, but isn't avoiding capex the main reason for the cloud?
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    If they lease it to companies, would it be considered opex?
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      It would be interesting to buy a load of them and set up as a cloud vendor :)
  • throw0101a 3y ago
    Private cloud is a thing too: lots of folks run VMware, Hyper-V, or OpenStack in-house.
• tibbydudeza 3y ago
  Reminds of what they worked on before at Sun ZFS storage appliance. Can it run Linux or Windows Data Center as ex-Sun folk they seem to have loved the last open source release before Oracle but now is still community developed variant of SunOS ???.
  • rhinoceraptor 3y ago
    The hypervisor OS is based on Illumos, which was forked from OpenSolaris, and it uses Bhyve from FreeBSD for virtualization. I would imagine the system architecture is different enough that running Linux as the base OS would take some work, for example it doesn't have an AMIBIOS.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  But there's no pricing! How will I know if this could potentially save me money compared to AWS if I cannot make a sensible comparison until I contact sales (or probably after I contact sales).
  • twoodfin 3y ago
    To be fair, if you’re in the market for a system like this, you’re probably not paying rack rate for AWS or Azure, either.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      Should be getting reserved instances at least
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      Most people that would be able to buy these would not, but that makes it more relevant to know how things compare. If you already get a 50% discount on your on-demand prices for AWS, does buying your own cloud make economical sense?
  • DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    Weird criticism, for anything involving CapEx it will always require an RFQ and quote. You're not buying a bag of peanuts and they will likely price it differently if you're buying 1x or 500x.
    • SanderNL 3y ago
      Why though? Quantity based pricing is not hard to express in a table. What is so different about CapEx and a bag of peanuts that defies even providing an approximate range? Number of zeroes, no? I don’t like it, but it is the norm sadly. It’s just a signal for “it’s expensive and if you even care about the number we don’t want to talk with you”.
      • darkwater 3y ago
• steve1977 3y ago
  Sorry, but this is quite a bunch of b... IMHO. Let's start with their beliefs: 1. Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. Yeah, no. There's still gonna be things like mobile phones which will do some stuff locally. And probably also desktops. And probably also on-prem servers. Which brings us to their belief no. 2: The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented. If you buy a computer and run virtualized loads on it, then you're not doing cloud computing. As simple as that. Basically, as others have commented already, this is just something like a blade server system or a hyperconverged system like for example Nutanix is offering. The only real difference seems to be the open source approach.
  • parasubvert 3y ago
    The ship has sailed many years ago on your definition of cloud computing. Fight it all you want, you're just going to be downvoted.
• albert_e 3y ago
  Is the name of the company "Oxide" or "0xide" (with a leading zero)? All text seems to indicate the former while the logo seems to spell the latter?
  • nopcode 3y ago
    Yeah the logo is a bit confusing, but the full name is "Oxide Computer Company".
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    The name is "Oxide Computer Company." But since "0x" is often used for hexidecimal numbers, and "0x1de" happens to be one, we play around with it from time to time.
• axelthegerman 3y ago
  > The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented. This 100%! Not everything needs to be a subscription. Sure there are running costs for operating that cloud computer as well as ongoing software development costs. But having photo albums in the cloud shouldn't cost me $30/month just because of storage - let me buy that hard drive (and maybe compute why not) and pay $10/y for operational costs
  • gizmo 3y ago
    $10 per year, minus credit card fees and taxes. If you send a single email to customer support in 5 years the company already loses money. The company can't just sell you the HDD and put a warning in the FAQ that you are responsible for data loss. Because that will result in angry emails and bad reviews. How many engineers and how many years does it take to build the infrastructure, write all the software, and deal with all the hardware to provide a photo service that "just works"? How many customers do they need before they break even? And obviously they can't raise VC because a business model that is predicated on making basically no money per customer can never have an exit. How would you bootstrap such a thing? It feels strange that physical storage costs almost nothing on amazon but the storage attached to a cloud machine is expensive. But run the numbers and you'll see that running a cloud service isn't about hardware costs at all.
  • dewey 3y ago
    I guess I don't understand how that's a radical statement if colocation was a thing even before you could rent cloud resources.
• dusted 3y ago
  > core beliefs as a company: > Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. Oh god no! Anywhere I can donate to have this not happen? I want my computing on premise, preferably under my table. But well, if it _HAS_ to happen, 0xide is probably a lesser evil.
  • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    AMD and Intel so they keep making desktop CPUs?
  • steve1977 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    No worries, it is just their sales pitch. They'll co-exist.
• eddyg 3y ago
  If you don’t listen to their “On the Metal” podcast, you’re missing out. So many great stories from legends in the industry. Just start with the first episode. https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal
  • jjice 3y ago
    And they currently run a podcast weekly called "Oxide and Friends" where they talk about miscellaneous things in the software space. The most recent few episodes have been about corporate open source and they've had excellent guests, like Kelsey Hightower. Definitely the best computer related podcasts out there. Bryan and Adam are great hosts and their humor is always a delight.
    • repelsteeltje 3y ago
      +1 Agree Other podcasts I'd recommend: ADSP [1] (if you're into programming), 2.5 admins [2] (if you're into computers). But I have no recommendations about hardware design because AFAIK the podcasts you mention and what Oxide is doing are pretty unique. [1] Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs https://adspthepodcast.com/ https://adspthepodcast.com/ [2] Allan Jude, Jim Salter, Joe Ressington https://2.5admins.com/ https://2.5admins.com/
      • vineyardlabs 3y ago
        The Amp Hour is really the only popular hardware/electronics design podcast as far as I can tell, and it's pretty decent, especially when they have interesting guests.
      • doublepg23 3y ago
        I've learned some very good tips from 2.5 admins but I have to take breaks often because their egos are a little much at times... The shows at https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/ https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/ are my personal go-to.
        • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• chrisweekly 3y ago
  Ambitious / audacious -- and compelling. Pricing?? Also "Facilities" link in footer: 404
  • benjaminleonard 3y ago
    Sorry about that, fixed – you can find that information on the specs page now
• TrueDuality 3y ago
  I'd like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality. If you're an embedded developer go take a look at Hubris and Humility. I ended up using those to GREAT effect for this custom one-off aerospace device and it was a fantastic experience to integrate with. Definitely a change from what I was used to that took a bit of getting used to.
  • throw0101c 3y ago
    > I'd like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality. * https://github.com/oxidecomputer https://github.com/oxidecomputer
    • doublepg23 3y ago
      MPL even, that should satisfy about anyone who'd want to contribute.
  • csomar 3y ago
    I agree. I stole some of their stuff from here https://github.com/oxidecomputer/third-party-api-clients/tree/main https://github.com/oxidecomputer/third-party-api-clients/tre... when I needed a SendGrid integration. High quality code and proper use of Rust types.
    • jeffrallen 3y ago
      Their ring logger was really enlightening to me about the value of Rust enums. Heterogeneous log events are dropped into the ring with some holding only the fact that something happened, and others holding additional data about what happened. Then Humility is able to print out the contents of the ring either online or in crash dumps. This is how you get logging in nostdlib Rust without ending up without half of a badly implemented printf. Instead, Humility, which has the full stdlib available, formats the enums for the firmware.
      • vlovich123 3y ago
• mgkimsal 3y ago
  I met a couple of their folks on site last week in Raleigh at the All Things Open conference. Saw a couple quick demos, and... it's not for me. But I can see the benefits, and many other folks stopping by the booth seemed to get the benefits as well. The folks at the booth were really nice too. Granted, that's sort of your job when being in a vendor booth at a conference, but it's surprising how often that's not the case (booths staffed by people who don't know the product, or are simply indifferent to the company, etc). EDIT: "it's not for me" - I'm not working with organizations that have that sort of need directly. Re-reading that phrase, it came across as a bit dismissive of what they've built (which is undoubtedly impressive).
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Thanks for stopping by! All Things Open is one of my favorite conferences, glad we were able to be there. And yeah it's totally chill: this product is not for everyone. No slight taken!
    • mgkimsal 3y ago
      Nice to have been able to put a real life face to a name I've seen for so long!
• deleted 3y ago
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• wg0 3y ago
  This is beautiful, Apple kind of elegant but the guys taking care of server racks are not the same crowd as those into Typescript/Rust/Go I guess? But yes, if multiple teams and they have direct access this rack to provision VMs, maybe yes. Also - as a developer you don't provision VMs on daily basis. You start a project, you need those resources at the very outset and that's about it?
• nu11ptr 3y ago
  > The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented. How is this different than colo space that has been predominant for years? Perhaps simply that it can be purchased more easily and standardized like a typical cloud VM?
  • drzaiusx11 3y ago
    That it's a turnkey, vertically integrated and open platform with everything included. Seems big enough differentiator for me. It's like going to going to a restaurant with table service vs a BYOB pizza shop.
  • FridgeSeal 3y ago
    I believe-as a few other commenters have pointed out and you allude to, the advantage is that it can be configured and operated like a massive set of cloud VM’s. There’s monitoring, provisioning, network, etc etc all setup and fully integrated. I imagine colo’s have something like this, but I _suspect_ operationally it’s a lot more powerful, easy to use and functionally closer to the API’s and behaviour users are used to on current cloud providers. Now, if someone who actually knows for sure feels like chiming in, I’m happy to be corrected.
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    It is the combination of things. Full FOSS stack, only cables being power and networking, and it being AIO package instead of conventional server rack.
• flakiness 3y ago
  I love they do not mention "AI" in the article.
  • Always_Anon 3y ago
    Because they can't. Their product currently has zero GPU compute.
• jjice 3y ago
  Huge fan of the people behind Oxide as well as the concept behind the product. Can someone tell a layman like myself where a 44M Series A funding round lands among other Series A rounds? I was at a startup during 2021 and when we raised 25M, it was a big deal for us and seemingly huge. Compared to that 44M is insane. Is this notably high or is my frame of reference just small? Either way, I really look forward to seeing Oxide's progress going forward. It's a company run by people who care and have cared for a long time, and they have all my faith.
  • benjaminwootton 3y ago
    People raise those sorts of numbers for web apps all the time. It actually doesn’t sound that big for such a broad hardware and software company with long and high touch sales cycles ahead of them.
    • twicetwice 3y ago
      Do they raise those sorts of numbers in series A, though? Other comments in this thread seem to suggest they've raised a surprisingly large amount of money for such an early stage of the typical fundraising process. If it is atypically high it would make sense to me—it's hardware which requires more up-front capital, and it's a rockstar team so I understand why investors would have confidence in them—but from what little I know about fundraising it does seem remarkable to me.
• vb-8448 3y ago
  Like too much the idea. If they manage to do get an IBM mainframe level after-sales support, they will rock. Does someone know how much the lowest level box costs?
  • FridgeSeal 3y ago
    Some comments up-thread suggested 500k.
    • vb-8448 3y ago
      Yeah, I read ... just "wow". I hoped something more affordable, or even something more flexible like "you get the full rack, but you are enabled to use only x % of the capacity for a lower entry price".
• caskstrength 3y ago
  They seem to be cagey about their networking. Nothing besides vague "100GbE to the switch". Is this some home-brew asic or fpga? What offloads does it support? Is the driver upstream?
  • Youden 3y ago
    No, there's just a lot more that can be said than they wanted to fit on this one page. Specs of the switch are available here: https://oxide.computer/product/specifications https://oxide.computer/product/specifications
    • caskstrength 3y ago
      I was asking about their NIC, not switch.
      • brucepink 3y ago
        They use Chelsio NICs - I've heard them mentioned on one or other of their podcasts.
      • eaasen 3y ago
        The NIC is a chip-down Chelsio T6 ASIC with 2x100GbE ports, one going to each Ethernet switch in the rack.
  • wpm 3y ago
    https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/network-preparations https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/network-preparatio...
• pseudoshikhar 3y ago
  I think it's something like - shipping management software with bare metal ?
• samuell 3y ago
  Now I only wonder if it makes sense to install a SLURM HPC cluster on one, and how much hassle that would be?
• remeq 3y ago
  I always had a feeling that Bryan and people around kinda took the tech first approach and it never really came to a proper fruition. I think the ambition behind the engineering marvels they did over time was certainly bigger. Dtrace, Fishworks, Joyent, then this... so why is that? Perhaps the fierce refusal of joining the mainstream side (Linux)? Fingers crossed, but...
  • bcantrill 3y ago
    You've been downvoted to oblivion, but let me add a personal rebuttal for anyone else that finds themselves here: I don't agree at all about "not coming to proper fruition": DTrace was an absurdly outsized success by any metric; Fishworks was if anything too commercially successful (we did nearly $100M of business our first year!); Joyent represented a successful exit to Samsung, etc. I have been extraordinarily blessed to be in the right place at the right time with the right folks several times over -- but never more so than at Oxide: our ambition is absurdly ambitious, but it has never felt more attainable! All of that said: thank you for keeping your fingers crossed. ;)
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      You can sleep well at night knowing you made Oracle a lot of money.
• mathverse 3y ago
  This is too startup-y and niche and too small to attract enough companies on the market. Best case this gets acquired by HP,IBM or Dell and will die out because talent will leave. I know a 4bn/y revenue company that could greatly benefit from this but they will never even consider buying from a company like this.
  • klysm 3y ago
    The value proposition might be worth the downside risk
  • throw0101c 3y ago
    > This is too startup-y and niche and too small to attract enough companies on the market. From their press release: > Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months. * https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-unveils-the-world-s-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-10-26/oxide-un... From an interview: > And what was the reaction of lucky rack customer #1? “I think it’s fair to say that the customer has appreciated the transformationally different (and exponentially faster!) process of going from new rack to provisioned VMs.” > The same day Cantrill appeared as a guest on the Software Engineering Daily podcast.[1] (“The crate, by the way? Its own engineering marvel! Because to ship a rack with the sleds, it’s been a huge amount of work from a huge number of folks…”) Cantrill wouldn’t identify the customer but said that “Fortunately when you solve a hard problem like this and you really broadcast that you intend to solve it… Customers present themselves and say, ‘Hey, we’ve been looking for — thank God someone is finally solving this problem’.” * https://thenewstack.io/in-pursuit-of-a-superior-server-oxide-computer-ships-its-first-rack/ https://thenewstack.io/in-pursuit-of-a-superior-server-oxide... Niches can be profitable. Not every company has to be "web scale". > I know a 4bn/y revenue company that could greatly benefit from this but they will never even consider buying from a company like this. What does "like this" mean? Small? Every company starts out that way. I think its cool that someone is trying to do startup hardware things, as in recent years it seems like its mostly software. I don't a use for the product in my area of IT, but I wish them luck.
• sambull 3y ago
  feels a lot like those vblock /converged infrastructure in a box things they used to push. Turnkey virtualization environment - I guess the advantage/? here is a open source stack.
• ls65536 3y ago
  As it appears Intel Capital is one of their Series A investors, I wonder if this has some bearing on the chances that there could also be an Intel CPU-based Oxide rack (or maybe individual sleds?) in the future. It seems that Oxide's product is rather tied to AMD's CPU offerings for the time being (which perhaps will serve them very well for now), and given what they've accomplished so far, I imagine it would take quite a bit of effort on the platform initialization side (and other lower level stuff) to get things working with Intel CPUs instead. Surely the ability to have vendor diversity for many of their components should be an advantage for Oxide (and their customers downstream as well), so maybe there's something to think about there. Of course, this is all interesting only once Intel actually gets competitive again on the datacenter CPU side of things, where they seem to have really dropped the ball in recent years. On the other hand, their networking switch hardware uses Intel components (Tofino), so maybe that'll be the extent of Intel's integration in their rack for the foreseeable future?
  • flumpcakes 3y ago
    This is interesting as I think Intel have stopped developing Tofino, after buying Barefoot networks back in 2019. AMD recently purchased Pensando, I'm not sure if their network chips are similar to Tofino but they seem like they are P4 compatible DPUs so they might be a good choice when migrating off of the dead Tofino platform. So if anything Oxide will be moving further away from Intel! I would love to work on this kind of stuff, not sure how to get started to end up working somewhere like Oxide..
• bilekas 3y ago
  This looks really interesting, but please can we get some idea of the prices involved without needing to contact sales teams ?
• osti 3y ago
  They use Tofino as the networking switch. But Intel is discontinuing Tofino so I'm wondering what does future upgrade path look like for Oxide? Would they consider something like a p4 programmable DPU as the replacement?
  • flumpcakes 3y ago
    Oxide racks curren use AMD CPUs and and after buying Pensando AMD now offer P4 DPUs. I would hazard a complete guess and say maybe a move from Tofino to Pensando is on the cards for future networking revisions.
    • osti 3y ago
      Company where I work at is evaluating Pensando DPUs and they are very powerful.
    • wmf 3y ago
      DPUs can't really replace switches. Maybe they could just keep using Tofino for the next N years until something better comes along.
      • osti 3y ago
        It kind of can if you want to add programmability to your switches. So on top of traditional switches, you can add a cluster of DPUs in order to add networking functionalities to your switches. Microsoft has done just that. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi23-bansal.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi23-bansal.pdf
• wkoszek 3y ago
  I regret missing the Open Source Firmware Conference--I really wanted to meet them and learn some more on what's the story here. I know it's a brilliant team, and since ZFS/OpenSolaris/Dtrace I've known about Bryan. The product is a nicely looking product too. One thing I don't get is the target market. Who is it? Banks? Cloud vendors? Insurance companies? I think there's a part of the computer business that I don't get yet. One guy in one of the previous HN threads here said that it's convenient to run 1 RFP for 1 box costing $1M-$2M vs running 30 RFPs for isolated components to put on the rack. Ok, I can see that. That's some argument. But I know that Supermicro has rack assembly service. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/rack https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/rack and I'm sure Dells and HPEs have the same. Does it mean that it's impossible to call them and tell them: "Excuse me, I want 2 racks, 15 systems each, top of the line AMD CPU with RAM, NVMe storage, all maxed out, and whatever fastest Juniper switches you can find. Put me VMWare vFusion on it. Ship this thing to Infomart in Texas. I have $2M here with your name on it". They won't do this for me? Its either this, or Oxide is going to e.g.: Bank of America, and along with RFP the bank is asking: "Show me complete supply chain records, including the source code to your boot loader, drivers, and any firmware that any component on this motherboard is running". And maybe that's ... impossible these days? I'm the startup CTO, so not the consumer base, but after DHH started posting his thing about cloud exit, I decided to explore this, and I walked the floor of 3 DCs (in SV/TX). People who walk you around the DC don't appear to care about cables, fans or noise etc. If it's longer than 1hr on the floor, they'll put Airpods in and they're done. I've seen cages that look unified, pristine, with love and affection put into cable layout, and I've seen cages that look like a total mess. It's your cage--you only go there if things break. My last guess is that maybe Oxide rack will end up being sort of what an Apple Macbook is among cheap HP/Acer laptops from Walmart. And it'll be a shiny toy of bold bearded IT dudes who work for GEICO IT by day, but by night they scavenge eBay for used server deals and get excited about the idea of running their own private rack in their basement. They can't afford it at home, but at work they'll want their own Oxide. If you're reading this, do know I know who you are.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    > One thing I don't get is the target market. Who is it? Fortune 1000, government. Large organizations that want to own their own hardware, yet want the cloud experience for deploying their software to it. First two customers to have received racks are Idaho National Lab, a Department of Energy laboratory, and a global finances firm. I think that gives a characterization to at least part of the market. > They won't do this for me? You are correct that they will do that for you. There are big differences though. From a hardware level, the largest one is that what you'll get in that case are individual 1U servers, in a rack, built from a bunch of reference designs, pieced together from various different organizations. We designed this as a whole rack. From scratch. This has a number of benefits, like for example, we use 80mm fans, at a very low RPM. Our fans draw less power and operate more quietly than the usual fans you'd get in that case. (I know you said people don't care about noise, and it's true that it's not a feature of the product to sell, just an interesting aspect of the design process: we didn't set out to make the rack quiet, it just is, thanks to other decisions that are more meaningful, like cooling efficiently) On the software side, we have written an enormous amount of software from scratch, designed for this specific hardware. Including a control plane, so you can think of the whole rack as a pool of resources, not as individual servers you manage yourself. And since we have done all of this in-house, we can take responsibility for the full quality of the product. If you have a firmware bug, it's not "oh sorry, we'll file a ticket with our firmware vendor and let you know when that's sorted," we will fix it ourselves. Everything is integrated and works together, because we built it for purpose that way, not because we installed a bunch of things from different organizations, ran some test, and said "looks good to me."
• cheez0r 3y ago
  Congratulations Bryan and the Oxide team! Well done on your achievement.
• VikingCoder 3y ago
  Next, I form a company that rents out time on an Oxide rack...
• tivert 3y ago
  That website is interesting. Maybe it's a Firefox bug, but when I load the page with NoScript on, the text is very weird, like this: > TODay WE aRE aNNOUNCING tHe It's actually much weirder than that, as some of the capitals in my quote are actually big lowercase letters, not capitals (i.e. the opposite of smallcaps).
  • dcre 3y ago
    Can't repro in FF with JS off (not exactly NoScript). Could it be an extension doing something weird? Curious if you see normal text when you view source on the page.
  • autoexec 3y ago
    I saw the same thing and wondered why nobody in the comments mentioned how painful this site was to read. Copy/paste the text and suddenly it's all back to normal. Saved the page to disk and loaded the local copy in the browser - also perfectly normal. Very strange. Maybe something to do with their CSS?
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    That is an odd bug I have seen before with a browser (not sure when or when). It freaked me out back then though. Open it in a private window and see if you can reproduce. By default, a private window uses no extensions though I prefer to have uBO enabled by default there, too. Another peculiar detail I saw on landing page is screenshot of management interface. It must be old as it shows various VMs including FreeBSD 12.1 and Ubuntu 20.10. Ubuntu 20.10 is EOLed long ago and also wasn't a LTS release. Not something you wanted running in enterprise 3 years ago, nevermind recently.
• wiradikusuma 3y ago
  So what's the use case for this? Can I buy this and start a hosting company?
  • apexalpha 3y ago
    I work at a Telco that needs the teams to be able to create VMs, networks etc.. But due to legal constraints we need to host it on prem. For those companies this would probably be a cost effective solution since now we spend a lot of resources managing varying Openstack installations with different hardware from HP / Dell etc...
• alberth 3y ago
  > "Today we are announcing the general availability of the WORLD'S FIRST commercial cloud computer" (emphasis mine) I'm having a hard time getting past the first sentence of this blog post. Maybe I'm missing the obvious.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Just marketing fluff. It's a rack mounted server. Nothing "world's first" about it.
    • mbakke 3y ago
      No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    They're selling a rack that hosts an entire virtual cloud. Nobody has done that yet. There have been servers with hypervisors preinstalled, but nothing like this.
    • alberth 3y ago
      Oracle, AWS & Azure all have "Cloud at Customer" offerings. And these offerings have existed for years. And from hardware manufacturers, Dell/VCE, Nutanix, and more "hyper-converged" infra has existed. Note: I'm not being a hater. I'm just genuinely confused. --- https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
      • reffaelwallen 3y ago
        maybe its about allowing you to create your own cloud, not using a third party vendor's software? its not a computer you hook up to a cloud, it is its own cloud? i only know about aws outpost tho, so I might be wrong
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  > We’re really excited to have the first commercial cloud computer — and for it to be generally available! If you yourself are interested, we look forward to it making its first impression on you — reach out to us! Can we please stop with the "the only way to get our pricing is by booking a sales call with us." This is a 100% surefire way for me to never pay for your product, and instead go to competitors who provide straightforward, no-nonsense pricing on the website. This is ironic given the amount of self-praise they give themselves in this article about how much they care about shipping something you can buy once instead of renting from the traditional cloud. Great, so then tell me how much it costs...
  • bionsystem 3y ago
    If you think you pay a fair price buying racks of servers from dell or hp by clicking buttons on their website, you are missing out. Purchase teams in my first company buying all sorts of hardware for our datacenters would spend their days negotiating and the end price was nowhere near the price listed online.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Their pricing starts at $500K (but realistically will be $1-2M per order at a minimum). This is not intended for people who browse their website, click "buy" and fill in their credit card info. If you don't want to talk to a sales rep you were never their target customer, and I'm sure they aren't sweating the hypothetical lost sale.
    • rwmj 3y ago
      I still don't get why they can't put a price on the website.
      • layer8 3y ago
        It gives them more flexibility and reduces competition. It’s quite common in B2B, for products/services in that pricing range.
• bigironcto 3y ago
  I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible. Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale. Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service? Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.
  • jiggawatts 3y ago
    Having worked in a variety of related fields, my take on this is that hypervisors like VMware have largely eliminated the need for proprietary hardware with “support” contracts. Just buy 3x the capacity in white boxes and turn off anything that breaks. The problem is that the industry hasn’t noticed this yet. The hyperscalers have, and are printing money as a consequence.
  • apendleton 3y ago
    I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was complaining about why every server in the rack needs a CD drive, which was the norm from Dell), because the kinds of stripped-down, super-efficient hardware designs the hyperscalers were building weren't available to the general public, so this is that: hyperscaler-like technology for people who want to own it themselves. I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.
• paxys 3y ago
  Regardless of how good the product is, are companies really going to trust a startup with 100% of their hardware, software and support dependencies with no outside ecosystem and no interoperability with any of their existing infra?
  • bobthecowboy 3y ago
    I work for a competitor that has actually been shipping a similar product for quite some time now. Yes, companies are really going to trust a startup for a stack like this. Will they go all in for 100% of their infra? Of course not, but as a test against a similar infra stack at a lower cost with an appealing feature set? Why not?
• kristianpaul 3y ago
  I definitely want to know more on their Kubernetes, this a software not designed for on-prem so i’m curious on their stack choice
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Andrew018 3y ago
  [dead]
• digitalsanctum 3y ago
  Congrats to the Oxide team. I'm not a potential customer but still get a thrill from the open source projects from these folks. My favorite is the automated CIO repo: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cio https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cio
• TrueDuality 3y ago
  Wow! Congratulations! I've been following you guys for a while and have loved what you've been doing. Really want to get my hands on some of this hardware to play with. I'd love to see a video exploring the rack and showing the first time setup.
• deweywsu 3y ago
  For someone who's not familiar with what you get from AWS, this appears to be similar, on the surface anyway. Can someone explain how it's different?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    AWS rents you time on their servers. We sell you servers. The difference is you own the hardware.
  • fuzzylightbulb 3y ago
    You can hire people that actually know how to drive business outcomes using AWS.
• nkko 3y ago
  I am supper impressed with how well-rounded they are. Wherever you look from git repo to the website and everything in between.
• rvz 3y ago
  I'm very skeptical on this despite so much praise yet no-one has used it. It seems the only reason why people are getting too excited is because of the team members and the name. What if this venture becomes yet another VC pump and acquire scam to get you to purchase a massive room heater? They better not get themselves acquired like the rest of the hyped up VC scams out there.
• breatheoften 3y ago
  I discovered their podcast a month ago and binged through the backlog -- it's one of the best technology podcasts of all time! Really like the way these folks think and communicate!
• dilippkumar 3y ago
  As a long time follower from the first "On the metal" podcast and as someone who has been cheering for you silently from the sidelines - Congratulations! You all have arrived. Wishing you decades of prosperity and good fortune.
• flumpcakes 3y ago
  I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don't see this is different. This looks, by far, the simplest way to run workloads outside of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). It seems they only support up to virtual machines but this is still miles ahead of VMWare, Nutanix, or CISCO ACI to my eyes. This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps team could manage it. With the other 'hyperconverged' infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it.
  • layer8 3y ago
    It may be a limited market. You need to be large enough for a private cloud to make sense, but above a certain size it also should be a no-brainer to have a competent ops team making you less dependent on a singular infrastructure provider.
    • dmix 3y ago
      Maybe 37signals type businesses, SMB tech startups with a serious, stable, non-high growth business model and a tech savvy team. If you're selling $500k boxes you don't need to sell a TON of them to make a hundred million dollar business. Unless their VCs expect Oxide to be a billion dollar company with a broader market.
      • ksec 3y ago
        Exactly what I was thinking. Since they are also getting out of the cloud. Although I am not too sure if DHH will play well with Bryan.
      • whizzter 3y ago
        With 44m in financing they probably expect a billion dollar company. https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
    • Nilithus 3y ago
• mstade 3y ago
  It bugs me more than it should that they flirt with hexadecimal numbers in their branding with the whole 0x thing, but the logo is 0xide when clearly it ought to be 0x1de. Designer came up with a clever idea but didn't understand hexadecimal, and no one had the heart to tell them? :o) I'm kidding, mostly. The engineer in me is bothered by it, but the part of my brain that cares more about design and branding understands that 0x1de would cause inconsistencies in the branding elsewhere. (E.g. 0xDocs: https://docs.oxide.computer https://docs.oxide.computer)
  • nwsm 3y ago
    0x1de would be great branding for some kind of integrated hex editor (hence IDE)
  • brucepink 3y ago
    You'll like https://admin.pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/01de https://admin.pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/01de then.
    • mstade 3y ago
      Haha indeed I do! :o)
  • nicwolff 3y ago
    https://0x1de.com https://0x1de.com redirects to https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer so they did think of it.
  • benjaminleonard 3y ago
    You may be happy (or unhappy) to know that was definitely considered – it felt a little more trouble than it was worth, and dare I say a little too on the nose? We did manage to get a neat PCI vendor ID: https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de
    • mstade 3y ago
      Haha yes, definitely a little too obvious. I love your branding by the way, great work!
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what The Cloud is that seems to pervade discussions like this. Too many technical people don't understand what they're looking at. The Cloud is not "a computer". The Cloud is a public utility. You don't rent the transformers at an electric utility company - because why the hell would you? It's just one component of a much larger system that is valueless to the consumer without all the other components. What these people are selling is more like a battery that you can purchase that plugs into the electric grid. But why would you want to purchase a battery? It degrades over time, losing value, and eventually needs to be recycled, and somebody has to deal with all that. Renting is the perfect way to push all of that time-consuming and complex maintenance out to someone else who can lower cost with volume. The idea that renting servers is not sustainable would suggest that somehow computers are not like housing, cars, shop vacs, or any of the million other things you can rent. A computer is an expensive commodity like any other, and renting makes perfect sense a lot of the time. If you need to purchase, for economic, load, tax, regulatory, or other reasons, there are already ready-made computers with (or without) service contracts and supported OSes that can be plopped into any colo, and colos sell dedicated machines already. This pitch doesn't include anything new other than buzzwords. Yeah I'm sure they did a bunch of engineering - that nobody will ever need. I'm calling shenanigans.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Oh. I get what this is. It's a "cloud" mainframe. They're trying to be the Apple of mainframes. Reinvent OpenStack, slap it on some 8Us and storage arrays, shove it in a rack, and ship it to a colo with a professional installer. So basically one of the larger server vendors but with integrated "cloud" software, minus the 2-hour service turnaround and spare parts. The fact that they're writing the software from scratch is going to add years of lead time until they reach parity with other solutions. My guess is they're hoping they can get sticker price or TCO low enough that it outweighs the lack of functionality and uncertainty of a brand new everything. If you just need some VMs in a lab in the office closet, might work. They only have $44M to build that company? I hope the next funding round is better :/
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    > slap it on some 8Us and storage arrays, This does not accurately represent the amount of hardware design we have done, let alone the software work. > The fact that they're writing the software from scratch is going to add years of lead time What lead time are you referring to?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• singhrac 3y ago
  Will Oxide build a GPU rack as well? Asking for a friend.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    We do not currently have plans for a GPU-focused product, but it is on our radar.
    • dilyevsky 3y ago
      Hey Steve, what is Oxide solution for multi-rack deployments? If i need to build spine-leaf do i have to byo spine gear or is it taken care of?
      • steveklabnik 3y ago
        Details forthcoming :)
• cj 3y ago
  Wow, they’ve raised a total of $78 million, and they’re only Series A! I remember a time when a Series A was rarely above $10m. Feels like at that capital level they should be further into the alphabet.
  • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    The business they're trying to build is capital-intense, and they're basically writing an OS from scratch, in addition to hardware from scratch. 78 million is actually really low
    • Fnoord 3y ago
      OS is not from scratch but based on proven tech like Solaris, Bhyve, Dtrace, Rust, etc. Stuff they either wrote themselves or are otherwise very familiar with.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
        I meant the "cloud" components, which typically represent a quasi distributed OS (because real distributed OSes don't exist) and thus are complex to create and maintain. But that's, uh, concerning, that they're also using Illumos. On the one hand, they're guaranteed to understand the system well, because they're probably the only people on the planet who do... On the other hand, makes it harder to hire for, port software to, or later sell the company due to the risk of maintaining such a one-off stack. But Joyent was able to pull off a big exit after almost a decade, so maybe these folks can too.
• SteveNuts 3y ago
  Does anyone know if they plan to support bare metal machines in the future?
• vasco 3y ago
  Not having a picture is criminal.
• bittermandel 3y ago
  I have been waiting for this for a while. Their OSS code is of the highest quality and I'm hoping the hardware is at the same level!
• BD103 3y ago
  I follow a person on Github who works here! (cbiffle[0]) They wrote a fantastic series[1] on learning Rust from a C perspective and I highly recommend it. [0]: https://github.com/cbiffle https://github.com/cbiffle [1]: https://cliffle.com/p/dangerust/ https://cliffle.com/p/dangerust/
• brynet 3y ago
  Congrats bcantrill, et al.
• cmdrk 3y ago
  send one my way to evaluate for HPC workloads, thanks.
• __xor_eax_eax 3y ago
  I feel like this company misses the point of cloud computing. Its mostly cost elasticity, not where your servers are physically located. This feels like the rackspace approach
• alberth 3y ago
  The irony is that Oxide caters to the HN crowd, but the HN crowd would not be the buyer of their offerings. Old school CIO's, who make enterprise decisions without developer support, are typically the buyer of hyper-converged infrastructure (or Utility companies who struggle with CapEx vs OpEd). I wish them luck. There's a bunch really good folks over there.
  • asadm 3y ago
    Depends. HN crowd will likely prefer this over existing ones in their day job.
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    > The irony is that Oxide caters to the HN crowd, but the HN crowd would not be the buyer of their offerings. Rust, Oxide, and iron-y.
• vercantez 3y ago
  Brian Cantrill is a legend. We're gonna need a sequel to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4. Very happy to see them ship.
• cashsterling 3y ago
  I've been following Oxide since they formed and I really hope they crush it. Semi-sort-of related... there was an automation company, Bedrock automation, that went defunct about a year ago. Their PLC hardware ideas were dope but I always felt like they were missing the boat a little bit by supporting stale PLC programming languages. I used to wonder if supporting Rust and Ada on these PLC's would be been a good idea to diversify/specialize into complex control system domains. Also, iirc, Bedrock didn't support EtherCAT which I felt was a mistake. Anyhow... one of these days it would be cool for a forward thinking company like Oxide to tackle what a modern complex, distributed control system hardware/software stack should look like using Rust/Hubris.
  • PaulWaldman 3y ago
    The industrial automation industry is highly risk adverse. In some systems, like safety, this mentality is justified without proper migration plans. In other areas, it's alarming, like choosing to run a system on hardware that has been out of support for 30+ years without adequate spare parts. Operation/Shop floor technologies (OT) are treated like mechanical equipment, "When it fails, we'll swap it out for a new one." Well, this isn't a motor, it has programming, and it interfaces with I/O sensors and devices. The main challenge is the lack of knowledge and skills in modern technologies among technical staff and decision makers in industrial organizations. A an aside, in my early days I hopped on a 5-hour flight and drove 6 hours to replace a failed hard drive in a Windows NT machine used as an HMI. Then a year later, replaced it and all the other clients with a vSphere stack. The local resources, both internal and external, were too intimidated to touch it. I'd be in favor of a "reset" in automation, it feels like fighting city hall.
    • cashsterling 3y ago
      I agree with everything you said... but there are a lot of areas in control system engineering that would benefit from having really robust hardware designs coupled with guaranteed correctness that Rust/Ada provide, and then all of the upside of all of the advanced control programming that is relatively easy in a modern programming language. Beckhoff & B&R Automation are part of the way there. They both have some really slick portfolios. IMO, on paper, these are the two most advanced control system companies (with large sales volume).
• gigel82 3y ago
  That's an interesting juxtaposition to Microsoft's move to "cloud computer" which is a thin client with everything (including the OS) streaming from the cloud. Or maybe it'll be a curious unintended match instead, with whatever "streaming" devices Microsoft pushes next being connected to one's own "cloud computer" instead...
• siliconc0w 3y ago
  I really appreciate the vision and the technology (also the dedication to opensource). The difficulty is that HP/Dell/NetApp/etc are well established and maybe if you're a SME you can appreciate the benefits of an end to end integrated solution but most of the people making purchasing decisions largely don't. It's easy to market on CapEx but difficult to market on OpEx - you're asking customers to (likely) pay more for a similar performance invariably less featureful solution from a small company which they're then locked into largely leaning on the promise it'll be easier to operate (where is your GPU integration, object storage, shared filesystem, integrated kubernetes, etc). They then have to convince all the incumbent software vendors to support their software (e.g SAP/oracle/etc) on this specialized hardware.
• addisonj 3y ago
  I have been following oxide for a bit, and really don't have to add to the tech conversation, but do want to say: Congrats to the team on reaching this big milestone and (in my eyes at least) just as much congratulations on doing it in a way that has been unique and sticking to values that seems to drive a strong positive culture (at least from the outside looking in). Shipping products is hard, and only getting harder. IMHO, one of the big drivers of that is just how complex every market has became. Building and selling software alone is so much more multi-disciplinary than it was 10 years ago and adding hardware to the mix is upping that by a huge factor. As I look around, I see so many companies struggle to build teams that can handle the huge range of required tasks. To see a company like Oxide that (once again, from the outside a least) seems to have things together on so many fronts, especially while doing it while sticking strongly to some core values, is pretty inspiring. Not to get overly cynical, but I don't think it is an extreme opinion to say that current start-up culture feels like you have to make big compromises in what you believe in order to be successful. Whether that be open-source, how you value and pay employees, or even just rushing things to deliver that aren't ready. While I acknowledge Oxide has some well-connected, experienced founders that I am certain enabled them to get the resources and trust to do things their way, I really hope they kill it so that other founders and builders can learn that you still can build not just financially successful products, but great organizations that truly care about their values.
  • bcantrill 3y ago
    Thank you very much for the kind words! It has been important for us to do things the right way and to be a model for others -- so it's really meaningful for us to hear that that's appreciated; thank you!
  • J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    > Shipping products is hard And shipping full cabs is harder!
  • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't honestly know much about the hardware side of things, nor the business/economic rationale for why one would prefer an Oxide rack over a more conventional setup, but reading through their posts, what they've done is just singularly so impressive that I really, really, really want them to succeed. I've worked in startups most of my life, but it's tough feeling like you've got to take a bunch of shortcuts ("MVP"-it before you run out of runway, etc. etc.), so to see a startup just put a ton of real engineering prowess into a great product is a sight to behold. Also, while there are obviously amazing products out there in the world, it's so often a "race to the bottom" that it feels like decently made products are just prohibitively expensive. I'm really into antique espresso machines, and there is a reason that seeing rebuilds of beautiful old lever espresso machines get so many oohs and ahhs online - they truly don't make them like they used to, so it's so cool to see these beasts brought back to life. For some reason I have a similar feeling looking at these Oxide racks - they just didn't cut corners to build an awesome machine. Again, not qualified to say whether that makes economic sense long term, but it's still a thing of beauty regardless.
• awoejtraor 3y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like these guys just reinvented mainframes.
• husamia 3y ago
  I was reading until I saw green and some type of rack looking thing, wait I thought it was not a rack! seriously, great job. let me own it first.
• daviddever23box 3y ago
  Love it.
• anyoneamous 3y ago
  As a HPC guy, I really like the idea of one or two of these racks serving as the cluster front end, providing the login nodes, controllers, etc. You would still need generic servers for the main bulk of the compute for density and cost reasons, but it would basically make the back-end part of the cluster into an interchangeable blob of cores, allowing us to focus on the interesting bits of running a service.
• novok 3y ago
  With the rack being so quiet, I wonder if they would ever sell these in smaller versions for more local installations. Would be pretty niche, but it would be interesting. Same kinds of markets that ui.com tries to serve.
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    Yeah the rack is custom designed to be very quiet. And it was early mentioned in the article. I'm sure they thought it through... but why? Do they want people to store this in their office workspace? It seems like a niche to me? For smaller embedded devices like home appliance and the like, fanless or the option to have low or no fan speed (like modern GPUs) seems to make sense. Because they're stored in the household or office. But servers are not and if they are they're still stowed away or fans are replaced with less noisy ones. You want the fans as noisy as possible to generate as cold as possible hardware which helps to increase heat dissipation for improved performance before any throttling.
    • wpm 3y ago
      >That the rack is quiet wasn’t really deliberate (and we are frankly much more interested in the often hidden power draw that blaring fan noise represents). They optimized for power. That roar of fan noise doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a better job cooling.
      • Fnoord 3y ago
        So for power and therefore noise. Why though? I can see how it is interesting given energy crisis plus not going to squeeze out max W for performance at the cost of energy. If that is the reason, then it is going to be more cost efficient than competitors on the longer term, at the cost of perhaps requiring more hardware to possibly scale up.
        • bcantrill 3y ago
          The short answer is density. Smaller fans are exponentially less efficient (that is, dissipate exponentially more power for the same airflow) and datacenters -- (and racks within them) -- have a power budget. The traditional rack-and-stack approach is held captive by a geometry that really doesn't make sense (19" wide x 1RU/2RU); if power is spent on fans (and in a traditional cram-down rack, somewhere between 20-30% of power is spent on fans), it can't be spent on compute. Density is critical, as DC footprint is often at a premium.
• josephcsible 3y ago
  They say this: > While the software is an essential part of the Oxide cloud computer, what we sell is in fact the computer. As a champion of open source, this allows Oxide a particularly straightforward open source strategy: our software is all open. But their homepage says this: > As soon as power is applied to an Oxide rack, our purpose-built hardware root of trust – present on every Oxide server and switch – cryptographically validates that its own firmware is genuine and unmodified. That sounds like tivoization to me. The value of their software being open source is heavily diminished by their hardware refusing to run anything but their "genuine and unmodified" software.
  • avhception 3y ago
    Not sure about the tivoization. You could never send a pull request to the Tivo repo on Github, because it does not exist. And maybe the Oxide hardware allows you to change the certificates so you can roll your own?
  • meithecatte 3y ago
    I suppose we need to know if it's secure boot (tivoization), or verified boot (remote attestation).
    • mlindner 3y ago
      From my own understanding its neither (unless by "remote" you don't mean Oxide). From my understanding there's no involvement of Oxide in running the computer. You should never need to talk to them to configure anything nor should you ever need to talk to them if you want to flash the firmware with something else entirely.
• necovek 3y ago
  Canonical did something similar back in 2014 but mostly for demo purposes with "Orange Box": the promise was that you could easily do it with any available hardware.
• lxe 3y ago
  Am I the only one who's confused by the offering? Are they selling cloud hosting or servers?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    We are selling servers. You interact with those severs like you would a cloud, but it is hardware you own.
    • lxe 3y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. Do I physically connect the server to the Internet or is it colo'd somewhere you provide?
      • syntheticgate 3y ago
        We ship you the whole rack you bought, either to your own on-prem datacenter or your preferred colo partner etc. Once on-site, assuming the infrastructure is already in place, it's ~3hrs to uncrate, connect power and network, and do the site-specific install configuration (like DNS, time servers, identity etc etc).
• exposition 3y ago
  Has anybody else used Rust for embedded? Would be interested to hear your experience. So far, I’ve seen mixed reviews. Some say that you can end up using unsafe a lot and so it’s better to stick with C or even use Zig. Wondered if there was any merit to this.
  • Aurornis 3y ago
    > Some say that you can end up using unsafe a lot and so it’s better to stick with C or even use Zig Using unsafe in Rust isn't inherently bad. If you're doing embedded work, using unsafe is mandatory once you get to the level of interacting with the hardware. That doesn't mean the code is literally unsafe, just that the interactions are happening in a way that the compiler can't guarantee. That's completely expected when you're poking at hardware registers. You still get most of the benefits of Rust, the language. I've had good success with it.
    • exposition 3y ago
      Yep I get that- it's just that using unsafe reduces the benefits you get from Rust's model. And so I was wondering whether using it is still worth it. Obviously, it probably still has many benefits over C but something like Zig might be simpler and better suited.
      • Aurornis 3y ago
        > it's just that using unsafe reduces the benefits you get from Rust's model. No, you still get the benefits where it matters. The "unsafe" is basically marking a boundary where you're doing things outside of what the compiler can verify. If you're poking at hardware registers, that's expected and normal. Putting "unsafe" in a program at the hardware boundary doesn't reduce the benefits of Rust elsewhere in the program.
• musha68k 3y ago
  Shining beacon of hope.
• _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Without JS this site's text is a weird mix of upper and lower case letters, even within the same word. Even large lowercase mixed in. The underlying text is perfectly normal. Can any web devs suggest why this is? TIA
• wmat 3y ago
  What am I missing here? Hasn't SoftIron been building this exact thing for around 5 years? Heck, they design and manufacture all of the hardware as well. https://softiron.com/hypercloud/ https://softiron.com/hypercloud/ https://softiron.com/blog/run-bmc-why-we-decided-to-build-our-own-baseboard-management-controller/ https://softiron.com/blog/run-bmc-why-we-decided-to-build-ou...
  • qaq 3y ago
    Not being familiar with SoftIron but I would imagine there can be more than one company working in a given niche? Why would it be surprising?
    • Aachen 3y ago
      The blog says they're the first
      • bobthecowboy 3y ago
        Correct. I work at SoftIron. We have several HyperCloud systems in production right now. SI has been shipping purpose-built storage systems for years as the root-comment suggests, but HyperCloud (which is closer to Oxide's product) has been in production systems in defense, banking, internationally for well over a year now.
        • glandium 3y ago
          It looks like SoftIron is not shipping a rack in a single box, though.
          • bobthecowboy 3y ago
            I'm not sure exactly what you mean. I believe our smallest configuration is 5 servers and a few switches.
            • 3y ago
• stonogo 3y ago
  When Hewlett-Packard released a similar product (rack-integrated compute), it was hard to tell if the backplane bandwidth killed it or the terrible Java management software killed it. It looks like this has a better design for each. There doesn't seem to be a way to provision a bare metal operating system, so HPC is out, and the networking is previous-generation, so there are two opportunities for progress right there. Now that they're VC-funded I expect an OEM to snap them up before either opportunity can be pursued.
• fuddle 3y ago
  Do they support GPU's?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Not currently, maybe someday.
• 867-5309 3y ago
  are they selling something? can we buy it?? it's anyone's guess..
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    We are selling racks of computers, and you can buy them, yes.
• ianceicys 3y ago
  Dumb question: How is Oxide different than AWS Outposts or Azure Stack HCI? https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/azure-arc-infographic/Azure_Arc_Infographic.pdf https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles...
  • mad_vill 3y ago
    iirc azure stack hci is only 1U and 2U configurations, not a full 32U rack.
  • mlindner 3y ago
    I don't know enough about Azure Stack HCI, though I expect it's similar. For AWS Outposts you can't actually own the hardware. It's hardware leasing on your own premises. More so, it's a black box that you can't inspect, while Oxide's firmware is all open source. You can even flash your own modified firmware without going through Oxide.
• abbbi 3y ago
  just fooling around with their demo web console .. "A disk cannot be added or attached unless the instance is creating or stopped." "A network interface cannot be created or edited unless the instance is stopped." really?
  • alberth 3y ago
    It's a nitpick but I thought its strange in the web console, main left navigation bar, it saying "Access & IAM". Because IAM = Identity & Access Management
    • abbbi 3y ago
      well, i just wanted to get a feeling what experience it would be using their web console and it seems they still have some limitations in place that have long been solved by other "hyperconverged vm-deploy" players. Want to spin up not only 1 but 20 instances via the console? Nope. Any kind of guest agent in the virtual machine? For direct interop? How is the guest filesystem freezed during snapshot creation? Checkpoints for incremental vm backup? They seem to use raw images, not qcow2? Why? etc..
      • alberth 3y ago
        They have 14-years of catch up to do, to be parity with Nutanix and the likes. Not being negative ... just calling out this is offering is super late to the game.
        • wpm 3y ago
          You are being negative though. You could have phrased that as "they are still new, but I hope they can catch up", which doesn't imply they messed up by being late to the game. Disruptors never have feature parity to established players in their first offering.
• PeterCorless 3y ago
  Congrats, Bryan and team! I've been following your evolution for a while now. People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them (or at least flame them in online posts). Over the decades the separation between "software" people and "hardware" people has grown. With "cloud" people have grown comfortable papering over poor basic performance by abstracting away even your visibility into how a system is running. "You don't need to worry about that! It's ~serverless~." But you'll worry when that bill comes due at the end of the month. With systems like Oxide, you are allowing users to once again actually see what they get, and ensure they get what they paid for, from a high-end cloud server. It should be putting other systems providers on-notice that the days of flaky, non-performant, and poorly-integrated components are behind us. People want beasts from their servers. And software designers, this is also your wake-up call that you can't just put lousy-performing software with poor CPU utilization and memory hogging on big metal and hope that it's "good enough." You really need to design your software to run ~efficiently~ in such systems.
  • throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    > People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them Lol. Bro.
    • mlindner 3y ago
      I'm not even the target market for this and I completely understand the feeling there. There's a lot of people who just have no conception of computing hardware anymore. People who are tied to AWS and have spent their entire careers working with AWS and now simply believe with a passion that "that's just how it is" as AWS continues to raise prices while their own cost of compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. This is a race to the bottom. This is a hot take, but I think Moore's law/Wright's Law has actually been disastrous for the entire field of software engineering even while it's been an amazing boon to software businesses.
      • 3y ago
• tevon 3y ago
  How do you think this will affect companies building single-tenant apps? I can imagine SaaS businesses offering their product as a "box": making on-prem significantly easier. Deliver your software along with the hardware, hook it into their network. Done. Anyone with more experience have thoughts on if this will potentially become a common option for SaaS?
  • wmf 3y ago
    Appliances were a big thing 20 years ago; they've been replaced by virtual appliances. You do not want to try to get hardware support from a SaaS company.
• unclejack 3y ago
  How can I build something for the Oxide Cloud Computer as a developer? Will there be something to simulate the APIs and so on? Similar hardware for home labs and for personal computers with open firmware would be great. I'd also love to see servers with hardware which can be upgraded (rather than completely recycled).
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    We publish an OpenAPI spec for the API. The console and CLI tools are built on top of this. We have a mock server for the console to test against, you’d have to adapt that if you wanted to go that route, but you could.
• nickdothutton 3y ago
  People that shun engineered systems generally don't understand the value. Have probably never experienced it for themselves.
• TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I have to say, as someone who will never buy one of these, I just want to see pictures of all the cool features they are talking about. And yet, their website seems strangely devoid of product photos! Or I have been unable to find them. I worked photojournalism in university, and it really strikes me when people talk about how cool their novel interconnect is and how clean the design is, but their long writeup doesn't feature any pictures?? Would love to see what it looks like.
  • punkspider 3y ago
    I feel the same. I'm also amazed at how much traction this is getting and I'm skimming through the comments to understand why this is so important. Pics would have helped.
  • mhio 3y ago
    This podcast on the backplane has the best set of photo's I've found so far: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1281318 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1281318
• prideout 3y ago
  Do they have GPU's?
• mkoubaa 3y ago
  To people who agree with the stated premise: "Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure" Do you think people want to design games with unreal engine on the cloud? Is there no desktop application that's safe? I don't fully accept this premise and I wonder if I'm the crazy one sometimes.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Game development and desktop applications aren’t infrastructure.
• mkoubaa 3y ago
  Sounds like a reincarnation of the mainframe
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  “Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.” My dad, who worked for IBM through the 90s and 00s always points out how amusing this is. We started with the cloud. Then went PCs. Then are going cloud again. Doesn’t mean this is wrong. It’s just amusing. If we do it properly, it should be far more optimal than all the local computers not doing anything most of the day.
• Animats 3y ago
  "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location."[1] Do they actually assemble and build their own racks of hardware, or is that outsourced? Somewhere, there must be an assembly plant. If this stuff actually exists. It's hard to even find pictures of their products. Do they have production installations? [1] https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers
  • nickik 3y ago
    Manufacturing is done by Benchmark in Raleigh, NC. Its outsourced. First rack shipped to costumer Jul 1, 2023: https://twitter.com/oxidecomputer/status/1674901883130114048 https://twitter.com/oxidecomputer/status/1674901883130114048 Here is a picture an incomplete rack: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfT7MHoUoAE90QZ?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfT7MHoUoAE90QZ?format=jpg&name=... You can find other pictures on twitter and other places.
    • nickik 3y ago
      Apparently I got something partly wrong: https://twitter.com/arjenroodselaar/status/1718350263734661175 https://twitter.com/arjenroodselaar/status/17183502637346611...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • choppaface 3y ago
    That comp number is apparently as-of 2021 and it was explained in a post by the CTO https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-values https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... Certainly odd but not out of the ordinary for a small Bay Area start-up where the Founders have a ton of cash and the focus is mostly on what they personally want to do. Posts like these are b/c the Founders want to hire 1-3 people who fit exactly into alignment with them.
    • steveklabnik 3y ago
      That number was just updated, it was less in 2021. We’re about 60 people, currently.
• modeless 3y ago
  No GPUs? I hope they have a plan for GPUs.
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    GPU/NPU. Would need CUDA for anything serious. Bound to Nvidia, for now. Even AMD and Intel cannot compete in this space.
    • Always_Anon 3y ago
      And it'll be tough to provide this because Oxide does not have a bare metal instance type (VMs only) and the hypervisor is running on illumos.
• otteromkram 3y ago
  I might be missing something, but I thought the whole point of cloud was to get rid of on prem setups. If users wanted to save some money, why not just implement a hybrid cloud system?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Cloud is a deployment model. Rent be own is an ownership model. You can do all four combinations. If you’re trying to implement a hybrid cloud solution, with part of it being on-prem, you would be in the market for hardware that to use in that implementation. We are now vendors of such.
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  What's the interface point by which I can utilise this "cloud" - is it providing an AWS like API, is it something standard I can tap into so I'm not "locked" into this just as much as I am my cloud vendor? Or is it all in on Kubernetes and I have to use that?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    There is an API, on which we have also built a console, so you can use the API directly, use various CLI clients we've provided, or the console. Or you can sling JSON via curl, if you prefer. If you want kubernetes, you'd run it yourself on top of what we offer, think EC2, conceptually. Here's our API docs if you'd like to check them out: https://docs.oxide.computer/api/disk_list https://docs.oxide.computer/api/disk_list
• LarsDu88 3y ago
  Didn't Sun Microsystems used to do this? Sell servers in shipping crates? Didn't that still come with the weeks of overhead that compelled people to adopt cloud in the first place?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    Sun certainly sold computers, yes. I'm not sure what "weeks of overhead" you're referring to, specifically, as it could mean a few different things. Happy to elaborate if you will :)
• zemo 3y ago
  their whole "AWS is bad because THEY are engaging in rentier capitalism, we are good because we sell you the tools to let YOU engage in rentier capitalism" shtick rings empty to me
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    I don't know what is rentier capitalism about owning compute that your organization uses? Could you walk me through that?
    • zemo 3y ago
      the vast majority of organizations buying this product will use it to build SaaS. Now comes the part where you pretend otherwise ("but hospitals/universities need this too!"), press me for more evidence ("how do you know that's what people buy it for?"), or feign ignorance on the topic ("what's inherently rentier capitalist about SaaS?").
      • steveklabnik 3y ago
        Nope, I appreciate the elaboration. Neither of our first two customers are SaaS companies, but there's no point in arguing about it: I have no idea if most of our customers eventually will or not. Thanks for elaborating, I at least grok what you mean now.
• LTL_FTC 3y ago
  I really like the company name! It's like hexadecimal notation with IDE! It's high time the datacenter takes a more holistic approach. For years I have been thinking that it's silly to stick a bunch of tiny fans in individual servers when one large impeller pulling air from an inclosed rack would be more efficient. Imagine large fans with ducts that come down to each rack or row of racks. Current in == current out; so a large diameter fan (5 feet) coupling down to small hose (10 inch) means the air moving through the small end will be really moving fast through those components!
• dizzydes 3y ago
  Can someone clue a greenhorn like me in on why this is a big deal vs prior dedicated storage providers like Hetzner etc?
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    I wrote this a while back, it's still true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
• astrea 3y ago
  I think I'm missing something here. Do they sell servers or are they selling some interesting service where you can buy a server AND they physically host the machine in their own data centers? If the former, what value add do they provide over IBM/SuperMicro/[INSERT COMPUTER COMPANY HERE]? The custom OS? You could get 99% of the way there with bare-metal Kubernetes.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    We are selling servers. The value is in building the entire thing, hardware and software, for purpose. This has many knock on effects, quality, debugability, the Buck stops with us, etc.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• oedemis 3y ago
  sustainability considerations?
• oldbbsnickname 3y ago
  Anyone recall Egenera? Compute only, virtualization, and fault-tolerance with the Ferrari of servers only MAANG-equivalents could afford in small numbers. [PDF] https://web.archive.org/web/20050325213243/http://www.egenera.com/pdf/www_BladeFrame_Brochure_042704.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20050325213243/http://www.egener...
• acyou 3y ago
  Couple questions: 1. Are there integrator companies that take these building blocks and build datacenters for other companies? 2. Are these racks intended to be bought in large quantities and put into new datacenters? 3. Is liquid cooling an option? 4. Do you sell datacenters as well as just the racks? Do you have any of your own datacenters built out? 5. Tough question: if these are so competitive and good for your customers, why aren't you also making lots of them for yourself and also selling cloud compute?
  • ahhfgsado6698 3y ago
    [dead]
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    1. Not yet, we’ll see what the future holds 2. Eventually, right now we are just starting, so working closely with customers and in small quantities, but eventually that is the idea. 3. No. We are already doing very well with fans, the design means a very tiny power draw. The racks are quite quiet. 4. No. 5. Selling hardware and running a private cloud are two different businesses. The public clouds don’t also sell servers. We don’t plan on running a cloud, even if doing so would be a nice experience, we have to focus on what we’re doing.
    • acyou 3y ago
      Thanks for the answers. Some followups: 1. Seems like you would need quite a bit of capital to be one of these integrator companies, to float the cash to buy land, build a facility and buy the racks. Does your own vs rent philosophy extend so far to also say that companies should also own the land and facility on and in which a server rack sits? Early on, Amazon talked about purpose-built datacenters being important, with huge power and internet connectivity requirements, earthquake/fire/flood protection and HVAC requirements. Sounds like the best way to go, if you have a huge amount of cash, seems like unit economics are now favoring data center costs in the billions of USD. 2. For now, would it make much sense to buy one or more of these and co-locate it with a cloud company's existing facilities in an office building? Or, if you had some space in a "good" datacenter where you leased space and sublet space, connection, power and maintenance costs to your customers, would that reduce the friction for buying one of these? Or does that essentially defeat the purpose and advantage of owning your own racks? If you remove the price of renting the rack, what's the ongoing cost to park one of these in an existing datacenter? Is that even an option? 3. From a purely mechanical perspective, the performance and efficiency advantages with liquid cooling vs. air cooling seem great. Seems like the problem is mostly around installation, maintenance, application requirements and reliability. Would be great to eventually see an integrated rack with liquid cooling plumbing hookups going directly to heat exchangers. At the cost of massively increased initial cost, maintenance cost, and with a built-in severe, catastrophic failure mode... Understood that this doesn't really make sense if these racks are being put into existing air-cooled datacenters or office buildings, which seems like it's going to be the case for awhile? 5. Too bad, seems like your prospective customers are in a similar sales funnel as people who want to rent capacity in a private cloud (and it's always nice to be your own customer!) What prevents your competitors from also selling servers? Do you think that the reason that public cloud companies don't sell servers is that they think their competitors will get ahold of the hardware and copy their technical advantages? Or is it that they have the deep pockets for building datacenters that their customers don't necessarily have, and they would rather have monthly revenue anyways?
• killjoywashere 3y ago
  People who think cloud computing is the future of all things don't understand where their chips come from.
• garfieldnate 3y ago
  I haven't listened to Oxide & Friends, but I absolutely love On The Metal. The guests are eminent and extremely interesting, the hosts are passionate and fun, and there's always a wonderful chemistry among the hardware geeks on the show that just makes me so excited to get into hardware and see what the future brings for us. Highly recommended.
• sinzone 3y ago
  The Apple of Servers cloud. Fully vertically integrated.
• Fischgericht 3y ago
  I know that many might have by now forgotten how an actual data center works. "One size fits all" will never work. Here are the main headaches that someone who actually runs a data center will run into: - How many power circuits does the DC provide you? What voltage? AC or DC? - How many amps do the circuits have? Is the PDU provided by the DC, or do you provide it? - How many upstreams will you have? Dual core routers? BGP? Static routing? Failover? - Upstream provided via Fiber? Copper? - Given that for the last couple of years being able to re-buy a typical server model (say: Supermicro), CPU, Storage for more than a couple of weeks has been a challenge, and given that rack hardware is supposed to run for years - how can I be sure to be able to scale? - What happens if that Oxide startup goes bust 6 months from now? - Would any sane DC operator really buy "we just built our own switch"? I wouldn't. Those who have been in that business for 20 years still f*ck it up on a regular basis. I want a proven vendor for my mission critical stuff. I am sorry, I don't see them addressing ANY of the real life pain points you have operating your own rack. Unless they ship a couple of data center engineers within the box. The whole cloud stuff is simply designed for managers who believe that in a job market where it's hard to find DC/server engineers that things will be magically done in the background. With this, it's worse - it's pretended that "stuff just works" if you ship it in a single box. And that's simply not a case. A DC installation not constantly maintained by skilled engineer will go down in flames within months, one way or another.
  • wpm 3y ago
    Many of your questions have answers in TFM: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction
    • Fischgericht 3y ago
      Part of the power distribution question is answered, in a way that gives even more concerns, though. A single DC distribution without redundant PSUs? What if one of the servers trips a fuse? By the way, the list of questions would go on. At least over here, DCs offer different rack footprints. They don't even list their footprint. But most importantly: The TFM doesn't say "There is an experienced network engineer in the box that you will own and that will do the maintenance". Unless this is provided, this will blow up. Again: I can imagine that they find a hand full of managers buying into this. Up until the date the first few of their racks have burned down a DC, or got hacked and all customer data stolen. Come on, this is hacker news. Everybody here should know that nobody so far has found a way (not even via AI) to replace the competences many of us here have. Again, I understand that management would love to get rid of those expensive and annoying nerds, but the ACTUAL REALITY is: An unmaintened rack in a DC will go down in flames, and management people will be in tears. So, let's just be realistic: Oxide is simply a terrible idea that will blow up. But I congratulate them for VCs falling for this. Now, let's find a VC that is funding someone doing an IPMI system that is not shit, does not have access to all data of the server, and does not get hacked within 5 minutes after deploying it. That would address an ACTUAL need. Sometimes it makes sense to ask those who you hope your future customers could be.
• mutant 3y ago
  You know what's cool? Pricing information.
• kjellsbells 3y ago
  I see lots of comments debating this technology choice or that one, as if the economic buyer actually cares. I dont think they do as much as the HN commentariat might think. All that really matters is whether Oxide's guesses about who'll buy and what they'll pay are right. Lets say that Oxide are guessing that their lead customers are telco and oil/gas: conservative industries, regulated, very strict about uptime and data sovereignty, etc. Oxide might spend 1 to 2 years running the gamut of all the people in those types of customers that can say no: ops, swcurity, network teams etc. But if Oxide can reach the finance team and get them to believe that a one time chunk of $$ is better than opex in the current interest rate environment, them it really doesnt matter what the tech stack is. (And bear in mind that financial models are f(t) so things might turn upside down as the economic picture changes over time) Assuming they have done this math, (surely a yes, or else VCs would not be lending them money) Oxide must need sufficent funding for a long sales cycle, and plausible enough bench strength to support customers who are going to hold them to ruthless SLAs and penalty clauses. All of that take serious coin up front, eg theres no outsourcing your 24x7 support to some kid reading from a script.
• emsign 3y ago
  > Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. I absolutely dread that future. I want all my computation back to be local, doesn't matter to me if I own the cloud computer or not as long as I also don't own the environment it is embedded in. If the connection to it isn't mine and neither is its source of power then I don't really control "my" cloud computer.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  I hate websites that aren't transparent about pricing. Like, how much is this crap going to cost? What are they offering exactly? I hate having to speak to some normie in sales just to get access to something. I swear - with how hard it is to buy from some of these companies its a wonder that they sell anything at all.
  • laniakean 3y ago
    I feel the same. I am interested in the product, but I want to know how much it would cost. Without knowing at least the range of the prices, I find it unproductive to contact the sales representative, since the price could end up way beyond what I can afford.
• unixhero 3y ago
  I want one. But what is the price?