7 ms·

I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special ab

I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?

drakenot 8mo ago
I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it. API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.
- mcmcmc 8mo ago
  Yep, it’s basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.
  - kijin 8mo ago
    Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license? If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful. If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.
    - panick21_ 8mo ago
      The software is open source and developed in the open. You can pay for support, but there’s no software licensing cost.
    - bananapub 8mo ago
      > Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license? what proprietary software stack? they just publish it all on https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ .
    - ahl 8mo ago
      So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product). Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
      - kijin 8mo ago
        Back in the 90s and 00s, lots of companies churned out software products that were sold once, supported forever. It was a sort of Ponzi scheme, supporting old customers with money from new customers. Which was okay during a period of high growth. But sooner or later the market matures, growth plateaues, and the cost of ongoing maintenance becomes a much bigger problem. Right now you're growing fast and swimming in VC money, so this is probably not an issue. At some point, though, you might find that even hardware depreciation cycles don't provide as much of a cushion as you hope they will. In an economic downturn, people might suddenly realize that Oxide hardware actually remains serviceable much longer than they expected. :)
nradov 8mo ago
Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.
sixhobbits 8mo ago
I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-servers-the-cloud https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...
mrweasel 8mo ago
While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API. Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools. Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  > Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools. If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 8mo ago
    Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
    - kevinrineer 8mo ago
      Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF budget.
    - panick21_ 8mo ago
      Proxmox is nice and getting there but what you simply can't replicate is the lower level firmware and managing layer. Proxmox on commodity hardware will always be limited by that. Same goes for deep integration with the switch that Oxide can do.
maeln 8mo ago
It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management. There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.
jeffrallen 8mo ago
If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal. If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.
- bubblethink 8mo ago
  All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
  - jcgrillo 8mo ago
    I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
  - unnah 8mo ago
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
kristjansson 8mo ago
A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make. Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.
tuetuopay 8mo ago
Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep. It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.

I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?

drakenot 8mo ago

I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it. API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.

mcmcmc 8mo ago
Yep, it’s basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.
- kijin 8mo ago
  Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license? If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful. If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.
  - panick21_ 8mo ago
    The software is open source and developed in the open. You can pay for support, but there’s no software licensing cost.
  - bananapub 8mo ago
    > Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license? what proprietary software stack? they just publish it all on https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ .
  - ahl 8mo ago
    So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product). Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
    - kijin 8mo ago
      Back in the 90s and 00s, lots of companies churned out software products that were sold once, supported forever. It was a sort of Ponzi scheme, supporting old customers with money from new customers. Which was okay during a period of high growth. But sooner or later the market matures, growth plateaues, and the cost of ongoing maintenance becomes a much bigger problem. Right now you're growing fast and swimming in VC money, so this is probably not an issue. At some point, though, you might find that even hardware depreciation cycles don't provide as much of a cushion as you hope they will. In an economic downturn, people might suddenly realize that Oxide hardware actually remains serviceable much longer than they expected. :)

nradov 8mo ago

Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.

sixhobbits 8mo ago

I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-servers-the-cloud https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...

mrweasel 8mo ago

While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API. Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools. Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.

zozbot234 8mo ago
> Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools. If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
- FuriouslyAdrift 8mo ago
  Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
  - kevinrineer 8mo ago
    Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF budget.
  - panick21_ 8mo ago
    Proxmox is nice and getting there but what you simply can't replicate is the lower level firmware and managing layer. Proxmox on commodity hardware will always be limited by that. Same goes for deep integration with the switch that Oxide can do.

maeln 8mo ago

It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management. There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.

jeffrallen 8mo ago

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal. If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.

bubblethink 8mo ago
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
- jcgrillo 8mo ago
  I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
- unnah 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

kristjansson 8mo ago

A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make. Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.

tuetuopay 8mo ago

Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep. It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.