8 ms·
Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud
- the_common_man 3y agoIs this like a nutanix? What is this?
- steveklabnik 3y agoI wrote a bunch of comments about this in the past. Happy to answer questions though! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
- ilhuadjkv 3y agoWould love to know what the minimum buy in is on one of these
- dilyevsky 3y agoiirc they mentioned on one of the pods that some configs go for a million. Im assuming it’s the 16-sled one but they didn’t share the actual specs
- bnprks 3y agoThe specifications page [1] gives a bit more context. I think minimum buy is about a half rack, which includes at least 16 64-core CPUs, 16 TiB of RAM, and 465.75 TiB of NVMe SSD storage. Playing around a bit with the Dell server configurator tool, it seems like that is going to come in a rough ballpark of $1MM as stated in a sibling comment. [1]: https://oxide.computer/product/specifications https://oxide.computer/product/specifications
- fbdab103 3y agoI do not purchase hardware, but $1MM is way above what I would have expected. Going to Dell, the most expensive pre-built rack mount starts at ~$30k. Assuming 16 of those only gets you to $480k. Throw in an extra premium for the rack itself + small company margins still leaves me reaching to get to that price point.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoPrice delta is out of the box cloud orchestration value (imho). Most large enterprises would struggle to build this themselves (Mesos->OpenShift->Kubernetes/Tanzu/etc), so you’re paying for turnkey cloud on prem. Probably save in the long run considering public cloud margins. Enterprise CIO doesn’t want a hobby project (attempting to cobble together internal cloud orchestration and infra), they want to be able to show immediate business value. You charge what the market will bear. I’ve seen many companies with thousands of employees and spending millions, even tens of millions a month, on public cloud providers and just flail, unable to get to steady state post transformation (even after years of trying). This is made for those folks, especially with Broadcom having VMware self inflict harm on itself with recent strategy decisions. “Write check. Cloud up.” (no affiliation)
- mise_en_place 3y agoI mean…you could also just get a z/VM system and have a few LPARs on it and just use Ansible for orchestration. Why wouldn’t an enterprise CIO just go for a mainframe system?
- dns_snek 3y ago"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I'm not the target customer base for one of these, but if they can deliver a server rack that teams can plug in, turn on, and start deploying workloads to it in the same way they currently deploy to public clouds with familiar tooling, that seems extremely valuable to me. It's going to depend on how well they manage to pull off the magic trick of "little or no configuration and maintenance required". If things start breaking in hard to diagnose ways, it's going to be just another broken appliance that requires expensive maintenance, and companies will be questioning why they didn't DIY it in the first place.
- panick21_ 3y agoIf there is one company that has made 'make it easy to debugging issues' their core philosophy, its them. Its almost all open software, that helps a lot. They add a minimal amount firmware, rather then the many, many million lines of firmware that is usually around. And most of the stuff they added is Rust on a micro-kernel. (Check out the talk I linked top level to see some of their low-level debugging infrastructure). To bad they can't (yet) get open firmware in the NIC, the SSDs and some of those other places (Time for an Oxide like company that makes P4 driven NICs). But nobody else can really offer that either. The only real issue for them is that Illumos is the host OS. Its open source and stable of course, and has good debugging tools. But in terms of industry experience, the amount of people with deep knowlage of the system are harder to find compared to Linux. The of course also add some complex software on top that will have to work properly, moving VMs, distributed storage and so on. Full DIY is pretty damn hard, you need a serious team to pull that off. The Dell VxRail/VMWare is the more reasonable competition. I think VMWare going full Broadcom mode will make them more interesting. Buying into that ecosystem isn't that appealing right now.
- c0pium 3y agoIf you’re thinking about it with the mindset of what the minimum is, you’re not a prospective customer.
- zja 3y agoIt’ll probably be a while before i get a chance to work on one of these machines, but I had a chance to meet a couple employees, Steve Klabnik and Travis Haymore, at a “Beers and Boards” meetup Oxide put on after a conference in Raleigh last year. They were really cool, as were a lot of the local folks that showed up. Would highly recommend going if they ever do one in your city!
- nasso_dev 3y agosteve is so cool. i wish we had more steves. we need more people like steve
- steveklabnik 3y agoAw shucks, both of you, thanks :D
- heyoni 3y agoThanks for what? I don’t get it!
- steveklabnik 3y agoI am the Steve that the two posts above refer to. They both said nice things about me, and that deserves a thank you.
- heyoni 3y agoNow I get it. You ARE a nice guy! I also realized I never read usernames.
- tehnub 3y agoIs this a rebrand? I don’t remember it being called a “cloud computer”. (Or why else is this on HN?)
- panick21_ 3y agoNo they called it that for a while. Why its on HN? Maybe somebody discovered it for the first time?
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoYeah, I didn't remember this kind 'branding' message before either...(it was servers?).... but the marketing changed slightly when they hit a milestone 4 months ago.... Bunch of discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891
- panick21_ 3y agoProbably makes sense when teams have to sell that kind of buy to their managers. We are not just buying servers, we are buying 'cloud'.
- bcantrill 3y agoI am... also a bit surprised that it's on HN right now? (We introduced the term when we launched last year.[0][1]) [0] https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/launching-the-cloud-computer https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/launching-t...
- sergiotapia 3y agoI agree. I remember Oxide was a balls-to-wall hardcore server "rack" soup to nuts baked by Oxide so they could provide exceptional performance and software stack. This "cloud" thing is new.
- rcxdude 3y agoI think the core idea hasn't changed (it's generally expected that hardware like this is usually divvied up into VMs), just the branding went from 'hyperscalar for the rest of us' (which is a bit opaque to non-techies), to 'it's cloud, but in a box'.
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago> Get In Touch > Contact Sales Nope, hard pass. If you don't list your prices on your website I'm never going to be a customer.
- athorax 3y agoYou were never their target audience. There is never one price off the shelf pricing for this kind of hardware
- deprecative 3y agoGrift pricing denotes a grift. If there's no price then the price is made up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __loam 3y agoI'd bet money there's thousands of b2b deals that look exactly like this.
- moooo99 3y agoConsidering most of the B2B deals are a huge PITA I’m not sure this is a good thing?
- martyvis 3y agoAll prices anywhere are "just made up". It's cost + taxes + profit margin you want to make on this deal. The market elasticity determines how often you want to move that price up or down.
- aaronblohowiak 3y agoAll prices are made up, except maybe “efficient” commodity markets..
- 3y ago
- panick21_ 3y agoI recently watch: Unplugging the Debugger - Live and postmortem debugging in a remote system - Matt Keeter [1] The talk was at the Open Source Firmware Conference. Pretty cool look into how their system works under the hood. [1] https://vimeo.com/877092565 https://vimeo.com/877092565
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoBunch of discussion four months ago regarding their official blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891
- andrewstuart 3y agoI’m curious to know if this is a good business model. Is the a market for these?
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- wmf 3y agoYeah, private cloud racks are an established market. Nutanix, VxRack, UCS, etc.
- rickette 3y agoAlso Oracle Exalogic (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Exalogic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Exalogic)
- PebblesHD 3y agoAre there any videos or screencasts of one of these in operation? I’d love to see a fresh out of box to up and running walkthrough similar to what VMWare produced for Tanzu. It’s such a niece thing that lots of tech people who’d be really interested will never get to play with one but it seems there’s not much material out there.
- steveklabnik 3y agoThe console is open source, and you can try a demo of it in your browser https://console-preview.oxide.computer/ https://console-preview.oxide.computer/ https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console I also wrote up a blog post walking through me setting up a server by hand: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/using-the-oxide-console https://steveklabnik.com/writing/using-the-oxide-console You can also use the API, there's a terraform provider, etc.
- jhickok 3y ago>The console is open source, and you can try a demo of it in your browser >https://console-preview.oxide.computer/ https://console-preview.oxide.computer/ That's pretty cool! The design language is a nice touch for sure.
- filleduchaos 3y agoPoking through Oxide's OSS a few months ago made me want to work with the company so badly. But I am honestly just not (yet) a strong enough candidate - perhaps in a couple of years! In the meantime I will keep rooting around in hubris[0] :) [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris - fascinating little kernel
- jmprspret 3y agoI feel very similarly. I have 0 rust experience and 0 Osdev experience but i love unix-like OSes and I am super super interested in what there guys are doing.
- int0x29 3y ago[dead]
- mad_vill 3y agoCurious if oxide is considering a 1-2U product. Feel like there is a larger potential customer base there but it also seems like they would lose the edge they built by owning the full rack. (I.e. integrating with customer TORs and network fabric is a nightmare.)
- steveklabnik 3y agoNot at the moment, but never say never.
- panick21_ 3y agoOxidePad Laptop product based on Helios with NeWS Window System. When?
- pjmlp 3y agoThat would be kind of cool.
- imglorp 3y agoI know Don Hopkins hangs out here sometimes, but the big question is did NeWS source code ever get liberated from the depths of Mordoracle?
- panick21_ 3y agoI don't really know. I was just trying to come up with some obscure references. Solaris on desktop wasn't crazy enough. I think a modern take on NeWS style system would use Webassembly style system with capability based access rather then PostScript and no security. Basically a modern browser with Canves/WebGL and without a lot of other stuff a browser does. Would have been a interesting alternative to the Wayland approach. Kind of sad that Scott McNealy didn't have the balls to open it up. Having some real competition to X in the 90s would have been a cool. Specially if Sun had pushed it at least somewhat.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- transpute 3y agoWishcasting a future Framework [1] laptop, bundled with Oxide rack for local and remote management: AMD Pro CPU with SKINIT and SEV AMD OpenSIL + OSS coreboot firmware Motherboard with Infineon 9672 (or newer) TPM for DRTM secure launch ECC memory Add-on modules for OcuLink [2] (external PCIe) and Nitrokey (2FA, HSM) with OSS Rust firmware [3] OS support for QubesOS (with Oxide management VM) or Oxide custom OS This could be used in the following business contexts: High-integrity client workstation within Oxide manufacturing supply chain(s) Customer local admin of Oxide rack Customer remote admin of Oxide rack, with mutual attestation Oxide remote troubleshooting of customer Oxide rack, with mutual attestation Plus demand-generating use cases from buyers of the equivalent Framework laptop model, who can install their preferred OSS components, including but not limited to the above business contexts. [1] Framework, https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1632642 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1632642. Lenovo and other OEMs may follow Framework's lead. [2] OcuLink expansion module, https://community.frame.work/t/oculink-expansion-bay-module/31898/237 https://community.frame.work/t/oculink-expansion-bay-module/... [3] Nitrokey Rust firmware, https://github.com/Nitrokey/nitrokey-3-firmware https://github.com/Nitrokey/nitrokey-3-firmware
- vaylian 3y agoI'm trying to make sense of what this is. I don't get what the unique selling point is. I understand that this is about server hosting. And from context I gather that this is about Rust. It seems that special/custom hardware is involved. And they advocate for buying instead of renting servers. But I can't figure out more than that. Who should be interested in this product? Does it make sense to compare this to AWS, Google Cloud or Azure?
- qaq 3y agoCompanies that run large on-prem workloads and want to have similar hardware/software to what the likes of Google, FB etc. have in their data centers
- vaylian 3y agoDoes that mean that Oxide sells computers that are optimized for on-premise cloud deployments?
- nilsherzig 3y agoI think they sell something like mini and on prem gcp / aws. You just connect the thing to power and ethernet and now you got your own locally running Webinterface / API which can start VMs, networks etc
- NetOpWibby 3y agoOh neat, I can have my own DigitalOcean with one of these?!
- panick21_ 3y agoNot quite. They don't offer out of the box managed services like DigitalOcean. No one-click MongoDB or stuff like that. No out of the box Kubernetes. You basically get Networking, Compute and Storage. Everything else you have to build on top. You will also get stuff like Terraform provider, SDKs and so on. > I can I guess if you are millionaire you could.
- kjellsbells 3y agoNot making a value comparison here, but reminds me strongly of the "engineered systems" of the early 2000s (where you buy a box+database all in one go from HP)...and most recently of the new Nexus stuff coming out of Microsoft's acquisition of the ATT cloud people. See https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/operator-nexus/azure-operator-nexus-faq https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/operator-nexus/azure-opera... AIUI Microsoft will ask you to buy several racks worth of (oem?) server gear and switch fabric, configure it to load up their version of kubernetes, and then leave you to run whatever workloads you like (or they approve of? Not sure) with the hook being that you can manage it all from azure. Pointed strongly at telcos, and I imagine that you cant get this without spending at least a quarter mil on hardware. Plus whatever azure fees there are? I wonder how many msft expect to sell, especially as telcos with spare cash are like unicorns.
- nightowl_games 3y agoI didn't think oxide was gonna make sense when they first announced it. What was gonna be their competitive advantage? I thought. I'm seriously impressed at how much they improved the on prem experience
- nemanja 3y agoTiming could’t be better. VMWare is actively firing and pissing off large swats of their customer base and basically Nutanix is the only serious alternative for onprem. What is the total overhead (in terms of cores, memory) of the management layer with Oxide (incl. block storage, vmm, etc.)?
- rkagerer 3y agoI get the hardware side. I don't get the platform side. What guest OS's does it support? Can you create "bare-metal" applications that run in some kind of container on it? Does this resemble a re-invented ESXi? How does the performance and redundancy of their storage layer compare to something like GRAID?