5 ms·

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

by 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
        I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.
        bobthecowboy 3y ago
        I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time. That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.
        grappler 3y ago
        This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
        bobthecowboy 3y ago
        If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with. A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc. So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there. It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated. Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.
    - electroly 3y ago
      AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.
      - linklocaladdr 3y ago
        I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.
        electroly 3y ago
        You can use EBS Local Snapshots, can't you? It stores in your Outpost S3 storage.
- zeckalpha 3y ago
  This sounds like Synology to me.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
Same here! I’ve not personally used it, but their stack of software is open source, and according to some commenters in the thread, super high quality.
ren_engineer 3y ago
I'd imagine they'll get to that eventually, these types of companies generally start at enterprise level because that's the most profitable and requires closing smaller numbers of deals. Once the product is proven and their support infrastructure is in place they can go for other market segments to try and maximize revenue
- xur17 3y ago
  It's not just about maximizing revenue, it's also about getting it into developer hands early (homelabs, side projects, college students, etc) so they can become familiar with it, and become an advocate for it within their company. Cloudflare is a good example of this.
  - campbel 3y ago
    I also like Tailscale as an example of this. Really great platform for devs to jump on for home labs and build experience.
e12e 3y ago
It would be great if Oxide had something like Canonical's "Orange Box"/cloud-in-a-box for homelabs, evaluation, training (in the management bits) - and hobby work loads! https://canonical.com/blog/jumpstart-training-with-the-orange-box https://canonical.com/blog/jumpstart-training-with-the-orang... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands-on-with-canonicals-orange-box-and-a-peek-into-cloud-nirvana/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands...
FromOmelas 3y ago
seconded. it would provide an on-ramp to get familiar with the software without forking over 500k
newsclues 3y ago
Not 1U but perhaps a box design that isn’t noisy like a pizza box server. Don’t know if oxide would want or be able to compete in the low cost market but a bigger a more expensive desktop/workstation as a mini homelab cloud could be a great option to get people trained on the oxide platform.
sgloutnikov 3y ago
Unfortunately they are not planning home lab things anytime soon, per a recent podcast episode [0]. If you want to play around with their Hubris OS: "You wanna buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris, and then you’ve got – you’ve got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks.” [0] https://changelog.com/friends/8 https://changelog.com/friends/8
- cprecioso 3y ago
  Maybe somebody can help me find the $20 one, but the one I can see is $460 https://estore.st.com/en/stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html https://estore.st.com/en/stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html
  - mkeeter 3y ago
    Look for the "Nucleo" boards rather than full-fledged eval kits, e.g. https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-h743zi.html https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-h743zi.html is $26.
  - taink 3y ago
    I don't know if this is a reputable source in any way but a quick search shows this: https://www2.mouser.com/c/?processor%20series=STM32H753 https://www2.mouser.com/c/?processor%20series=STM32H753

by jpdb 3y ago

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
      I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.
      - bobthecowboy 3y ago
        I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time. That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.
        grappler 3y ago
        This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
        bobthecowboy 3y ago
        If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with. A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc. So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there. It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated. Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.
  - electroly 3y ago
    AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.
    - linklocaladdr 3y ago
      I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.
      - electroly 3y ago
        You can use EBS Local Snapshots, can't you? It stores in your Outpost S3 storage.
zeckalpha 3y ago
This sounds like Synology to me.

FridgeSeal 3y ago

Same here! I’ve not personally used it, but their stack of software is open source, and according to some commenters in the thread, super high quality.

ren_engineer 3y ago

I'd imagine they'll get to that eventually, these types of companies generally start at enterprise level because that's the most profitable and requires closing smaller numbers of deals. Once the product is proven and their support infrastructure is in place they can go for other market segments to try and maximize revenue

xur17 3y ago
It's not just about maximizing revenue, it's also about getting it into developer hands early (homelabs, side projects, college students, etc) so they can become familiar with it, and become an advocate for it within their company. Cloudflare is a good example of this.
- campbel 3y ago
  I also like Tailscale as an example of this. Really great platform for devs to jump on for home labs and build experience.

e12e 3y ago

It would be great if Oxide had something like Canonical's "Orange Box"/cloud-in-a-box for homelabs, evaluation, training (in the management bits) - and hobby work loads! https://canonical.com/blog/jumpstart-training-with-the-orange-box https://canonical.com/blog/jumpstart-training-with-the-orang... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands-on-with-canonicals-orange-box-and-a-peek-into-cloud-nirvana/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands...

FromOmelas 3y ago

seconded. it would provide an on-ramp to get familiar with the software without forking over 500k

newsclues 3y ago

Not 1U but perhaps a box design that isn’t noisy like a pizza box server. Don’t know if oxide would want or be able to compete in the low cost market but a bigger a more expensive desktop/workstation as a mini homelab cloud could be a great option to get people trained on the oxide platform.

sgloutnikov 3y ago

Unfortunately they are not planning home lab things anytime soon, per a recent podcast episode [0]. If you want to play around with their Hubris OS: "You wanna buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris, and then you’ve got – you’ve got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks.” [0] https://changelog.com/friends/8 https://changelog.com/friends/8

cprecioso 3y ago
Maybe somebody can help me find the $20 one, but the one I can see is $460 https://estore.st.com/en/stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html https://estore.st.com/en/stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html
- mkeeter 3y ago
  Look for the "Nucleo" boards rather than full-fledged eval kits, e.g. https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-h743zi.html https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-h743zi.html is $26.
- taink 3y ago
  I don't know if this is a reputable source in any way but a quick search shows this: https://www2.mouser.com/c/?processor%20series=STM32H753 https://www2.mouser.com/c/?processor%20series=STM32H753