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Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

149 points| vmoore | 1 year ago |oxide.computer

111 comments

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zja|1 year ago

It’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|1 year ago

steve is so cool. i wish we had more steves. we need more people like steve

transpute|1 year ago

Wishcasting 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. Lenovo and other OEMs may follow Framework's lead.

[2] OcuLink expansion module, https://community.frame.work/t/oculink-expansion-bay-module/...

[3] Nitrokey Rust firmware, https://github.com/Nitrokey/nitrokey-3-firmware

vaylian|1 year ago

I'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?

bananapub|1 year ago

I don't understand why this exact comment is posted on every thread about them - it's not very complicated.

"Cloud computing" style systems are nice in some ways - you can just ask a computer to give you some virtual computers and virtual storage and it gives it to you. Whoever owns them can put quotas or pricing or whatever on you, but you can self-serve, and you don't have to care about replacing DIMMs or NVMe sticks or whatever.

Having some random American megacorp host things in a datacenter is good for some people, bad for others. You might not want to be in their legal jurisdiction, or you're legally not allowed to, or you just don't want to, or their prices for your volume are too high, or you don't want to be locked in to whatever future bad choices they make.

So, Oxide made racks of machines you can buy, plug in, and then have a cloud-style (virtual machine, virtual storage, virtual network) system at home.

I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

dns_snek|1 year ago

It seems like they're vertically integrating everything from hardware to the hypervisor/orchestration layer (something that serves the same function as Kubernetes?) along with their own developer tooling for deploying and managing workloads.

edit: And it seems like it's aimed at companies that don't want to pay cloud margins, but don't (yet) have the expertise to set up a production-worthy Kubernetes (or similar) cluster from scratch. An opinionated appliance vs DIY approach.

manoDev|1 year ago

It seems this is mainframe (a complete, supported, vertically integrated solution), just not from IBM.

vasco|1 year ago

It's like Openstack-in-a-box except with a promise that it'll behave more like AWS than Openstack. And you buy hardware.

qaq|1 year ago

Companies 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

mad_vill|1 year ago

Curious 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|1 year ago

Not at the moment, but never say never.

glandium|1 year ago

A 6U product kind of like the blade server enclosures could be interesting too. That said, I haven't worked in a datacenter for 14 years, so don't listen to me too seriously...

geek_at|1 year ago

I'd love a homelab sized version of the oxide system. Just looks so amazing

panick21_|1 year ago

I 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

bcantrill|1 year ago

I am unspeakably biased, but I love this talk from Matt!

ilhuadjkv|1 year ago

Would love to know what the minimum buy in is on one of these

bnprks|1 year ago

The 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

c0pium|1 year ago

If you’re thinking about it with the mindset of what the minimum is, you’re not a prospective customer.

dilyevsky|1 year ago

iirc 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

kjellsbells|1 year ago

Not 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-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.

PebblesHD|1 year ago

Are 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.

tehnub|1 year ago

Is this a rebrand? I don’t remember it being called a “cloud computer”. (Or why else is this on HN?)

sergiotapia|1 year ago

I 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.

panick21_|1 year ago

No they called it that for a while.

Why its on HN? Maybe somebody discovered it for the first time?

rkagerer|1 year ago

I 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?

nemanja|1 year ago

Timing 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.)?

nightowl_games|1 year ago

I 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

lopkeny12ko|1 year 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|1 year ago

You were never their target audience. There is never one price off the shelf pricing for this kind of hardware

fbdab103|1 year ago

It is not a consumer item. The people who would consider this product are well acquainted will involving sales people.

seabird|1 year ago

That's great as far as they're concerned. This is a seven digit purchase with a lot of moving parts. They need to know that you can actually pay them and you need to get an opportunity for your lawyers to grill them and get them on the hook for as much as possible. The big leagues aren't for everybody.

wpm|1 year ago

You were gonna drop $2.5M on one of these racks?

wmf|1 year ago

It's (unofficially) a half million to a million depending on configuration.

speedgoose|1 year ago

It’s a great filter. If the price is a "contact us" it means they target businesses with more money than IT skills.

thfuran|1 year ago

Welcome to b2b.

andrewstuart|1 year ago

I’m curious to know if this is a good business model.

Is the a market for these?

wmf|1 year ago

Yeah, private cloud racks are an established market. Nutanix, VxRack, UCS, etc.