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I sure do. We've finally got to a place where we don't need weird hardware tricks to containerize workloads -- this is why a lot of shops pursue docker-like op

I sure do. We've finally got to a place where we don't need weird hardware tricks to containerize workloads -- this is why a lot of shops pursue docker-like ops for production. When I buy hardware, long-term maintenance is a factor, and when my whole operations fleet relies on ESX, or in this case a Solaris fork, I'm now beholden to one company for support at that layer. Buying a rack of Supermicro gear and running RHEL or SLES with containerized orchestration on top means I can, in a pinch, hire experts anywhere to work on my systems. I have no reason to believe Oxide would be anything but responsive and effective in supporting their systems, but introducing bespoke software this deep in the stack severely curtails my options if things get bad.

apendleton 3y ago
I think the value proposition they're offering is a carefully integrated system where everything has been thoroughly engineered/tested to work with everything else, down to writing custom firmware to guarantee that it's all ship-shape, so that customers don't have to touch any of the innards, and will probably just treat them as a black box. It seems like it's chock-full of stuff that they custom-built and that nobody else would be familiar with, by design. If that's not what you want, this probably isn't the product for you.
jeffbee 3y ago
I can somewhat see your point, but in my experience you can't rely on RHEL or whatever vendor Linux to correctly bring up random OEM hardware. You will slowly discover all of the quirks, like it didn't initialize the platform EDAC the way you expected, or it didn't resolve some weird IRQ issue, etc. Nothing about my experience leads me to believe Linux will JFW on a given box, so I don't feel like Linux has an advantage in this regard, or that niche operating systems have a disadvantage. Certainly I feel like a first-party OS from the hardware vendor is going to have a lot of advantages.

apendleton 3y ago

I think the value proposition they're offering is a carefully integrated system where everything has been thoroughly engineered/tested to work with everything else, down to writing custom firmware to guarantee that it's all ship-shape, so that customers don't have to touch any of the innards, and will probably just treat them as a black box. It seems like it's chock-full of stuff that they custom-built and that nobody else would be familiar with, by design. If that's not what you want, this probably isn't the product for you.

jeffbee 3y ago

I can somewhat see your point, but in my experience you can't rely on RHEL or whatever vendor Linux to correctly bring up random OEM hardware. You will slowly discover all of the quirks, like it didn't initialize the platform EDAC the way you expected, or it didn't resolve some weird IRQ issue, etc. Nothing about my experience leads me to believe Linux will JFW on a given box, so I don't feel like Linux has an advantage in this regard, or that niche operating systems have a disadvantage. Certainly I feel like a first-party OS from the hardware vendor is going to have a lot of advantages.