3 ms·

I hope they sooner or later release a smaller, cheaper, homelab product for people to learn or for startups that will lead to future rack sales or workers.

steveklabnik 3y ago
This is a common request and we absolutely understand the desire, but I suspect such a thing, if ever, will be a long time off. Given that the product is designed as an entire rack, doing something like this would effectively be a different product for a different vertical, and we have to focus on our current business. Honestly it's kind of frustrating not being able to reciprocate the enthusiasm back in more than just words, but it is what it is.
- newsclues 3y ago
  I appreciate the response, I totally understand and don’t expect it to materialize soon, but am still hopeful that someday it will be a possibility.
- amluto 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. Some examples: x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the default in the datacenter. It was hard for ARM to break in and it mostly happened when AWS did it by fiat. If ARM had made some loss-leader actually useful laptops and workstations available, it might have happened sooner. But x86 largely didn’t deploy AVX-512 in client machines, so people who wrote libraries only used it for fun or benchmarking, so it wasn’t widely used, and most users flubbed it anyway. (And might have gotten it right if they had the hardware on their desk.) People target Nvidia datacenter GPUs. But people have targeted them for a long time, because they have them in their gaming machines too. Xilinx used to push free academic gear quite hard, because that was a big lead into people learning how to use their gear. So, if I were giving Oxide straightforward sales advice, absolutely don’t get distracted with small systems. But maybe, if Oxide thought of it as lead generation, Oxide should do it anyway. If I could buy something small enough to be affordable but big enough to be useful [0], I might get one. And I’d target it with my own stuff, and fix bugs, and evangelize it at little cost to Oxide. [0] For me, maybe 100-150TB of spinning rust (or cheap NVMe or the ability to attach a JBOD), plus anywhere from 4-64 cores, in a format that works on 120V and fits in, say, 16U or less, at a credible price point, would be quite likely to net Oxide a sale. (Just one sale but still!) It could be sold as a developer thing, and there would be absolutely no expectation that it would perform like the real thing. If I found it awesome, I might buy a couple more. But I would also use it and make things work on it and talk about it, and if a whole bunch of people did this, Oxide might get a bunch of real sales. (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    I certainly understand that strategy generally, see also Adobe giving Photoshop licenses to students back in the day so that they'd be familiar professionally. It's just that doing so amounts to building an entirely new product, and as a relatively young startup, focus is more important. We're going deep, not wide. Someday :) > (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.) Right now, this early: no. Sleds have compute and storage located together, so the unit of customization is currently "number of sleds in the rack" which according to https://oxide.computer/product/specifications https://oxide.computer/product/specifications apparently is currently three, not two, at the moment: 16, 24 or 32 sleds. You are right that these need to be different for certain customers and workloads, we just aren't ready to support those just yet. We'll get there. Same issue, different aspect.
    - newsclues 3y ago
      Until then maybe sell a few to schools to provision for student access? A future of developers and CTOs who grew up with Oxide!
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        My friends and I had a small server set up in college, and those were some of the best times of those years. :D
    - amluto 3y ago
      On reading the specs, you’re using 2.91TiB U.2 drives. On the list of “oh my gosh too much engineering and too many stock keeping units,” allowing them to be swapped for the much larger U.2 devices one can buy now seems fairly easy. In case there’s a potential thermal issue, most NVMe drives I’ve checked have active power states that are a bit slower but have reduced power consumption. But Oxide is small and shouldn’t listen to me unless a customer asks for this.
    - mattclarkdotnet 3y ago
whalesalad 3y ago
can't wait to find liquidated oxide gear on ebay in 2035. all my current homelab gear is "ancient" enterprise gear like R720's etc
faitswulff 3y ago
We'll have to wait for it to hit Groupon.

steveklabnik 3y ago

This is a common request and we absolutely understand the desire, but I suspect such a thing, if ever, will be a long time off. Given that the product is designed as an entire rack, doing something like this would effectively be a different product for a different vertical, and we have to focus on our current business. Honestly it's kind of frustrating not being able to reciprocate the enthusiasm back in more than just words, but it is what it is.

newsclues 3y ago
I appreciate the response, I totally understand and don’t expect it to materialize soon, but am still hopeful that someday it will be a possibility.
amluto 3y ago
For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. Some examples: x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the default in the datacenter. It was hard for ARM to break in and it mostly happened when AWS did it by fiat. If ARM had made some loss-leader actually useful laptops and workstations available, it might have happened sooner. But x86 largely didn’t deploy AVX-512 in client machines, so people who wrote libraries only used it for fun or benchmarking, so it wasn’t widely used, and most users flubbed it anyway. (And might have gotten it right if they had the hardware on their desk.) People target Nvidia datacenter GPUs. But people have targeted them for a long time, because they have them in their gaming machines too. Xilinx used to push free academic gear quite hard, because that was a big lead into people learning how to use their gear. So, if I were giving Oxide straightforward sales advice, absolutely don’t get distracted with small systems. But maybe, if Oxide thought of it as lead generation, Oxide should do it anyway. If I could buy something small enough to be affordable but big enough to be useful [0], I might get one. And I’d target it with my own stuff, and fix bugs, and evangelize it at little cost to Oxide. [0] For me, maybe 100-150TB of spinning rust (or cheap NVMe or the ability to attach a JBOD), plus anywhere from 4-64 cores, in a format that works on 120V and fits in, say, 16U or less, at a credible price point, would be quite likely to net Oxide a sale. (Just one sale but still!) It could be sold as a developer thing, and there would be absolutely no expectation that it would perform like the real thing. If I found it awesome, I might buy a couple more. But I would also use it and make things work on it and talk about it, and if a whole bunch of people did this, Oxide might get a bunch of real sales. (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  I certainly understand that strategy generally, see also Adobe giving Photoshop licenses to students back in the day so that they'd be familiar professionally. It's just that doing so amounts to building an entirely new product, and as a relatively young startup, focus is more important. We're going deep, not wide. Someday :) > (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.) Right now, this early: no. Sleds have compute and storage located together, so the unit of customization is currently "number of sleds in the rack" which according to https://oxide.computer/product/specifications https://oxide.computer/product/specifications apparently is currently three, not two, at the moment: 16, 24 or 32 sleds. You are right that these need to be different for certain customers and workloads, we just aren't ready to support those just yet. We'll get there. Same issue, different aspect.
  - newsclues 3y ago
    Until then maybe sell a few to schools to provision for student access? A future of developers and CTOs who grew up with Oxide!
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      My friends and I had a small server set up in college, and those were some of the best times of those years. :D
  - amluto 3y ago
    On reading the specs, you’re using 2.91TiB U.2 drives. On the list of “oh my gosh too much engineering and too many stock keeping units,” allowing them to be swapped for the much larger U.2 devices one can buy now seems fairly easy. In case there’s a potential thermal issue, most NVMe drives I’ve checked have active power states that are a bit slower but have reduced power consumption. But Oxide is small and shouldn’t listen to me unless a customer asks for this.
  - mattclarkdotnet 3y ago

whalesalad 3y ago

can't wait to find liquidated oxide gear on ebay in 2035. all my current homelab gear is "ancient" enterprise gear like R720's etc

faitswulff 3y ago

We'll have to wait for it to hit Groupon.