I kind of want one of these in my home, I wonder what the price range will be.
for what they're advertising there, on the order of $1mm, based on underlying hardware costs.
Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
31–40 of 264 posts
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#32As I understand it, Oxide is going to have deep software integration into their hardware. So the expectation isn't that the servers in this rack will be running Windows or a generic Linux distribution. In case anyone from Oxide is here, is my understanding correct? And if so, will there be a way to run a smaller version of an Oxide system, say for testing or development, without purchasing an entire rack at a time? A…
Agreed, I would love to hear more about the management plane. I'm glad it's API-driven, but I still have some questions about things like which hypervisor they are using. If it's a custom software stack, might be nice to get a miniature dev-kit!
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Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#33Looks interesting. I wonder if the high integration makes it behave as a single-image machine with that many cores.
No, single system image is really expensive (see Superdome Flex) and most workloads can't justify that cost.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#34Congrats Oxide team! More competition in this space is always a good thing.
I'm curious about management. Can the rack operate completely standalone? I assume when you have multiple there will be some management abstraction above the rack layer?
The closest direct equivalent that I can think of to this is AWS outposts. Are there any others that I'm forgetting?
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#35Why are we hard coupling the hardware to the software? The whole secret of the success of M1 and ARM in servers is that lots of software has long ago stopped being hyper-aware of what hardware it is running on. What software are we talking about anyways? It's all incredibly vague, but it seems to reach all the way into the Kubernetes sphere. Why would I run this over something I can use on my next job?
It's probs cheaper than AWS if you already have on prem infra. AWS has pretty damn good margins.
And the idea of "these racks are my kubernetes cluster and are supported by the OEM as such" has a lot of value to a lot of the medium sized IT departments I've run across.
Can you expand on what you mean on "coupling the hardware to the software"?
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#36Looks like a white labeled viking VDS2249R running custom software.
This is not my area of expertise, but it does look like that[0].
That "custom software," though, is where the magic often lies. As a software person that worked at hardware companies for most of my career, I know all too well, how disrespectful hardware people are of software. If they have a good software-respecting management chain, then it might be pretty awesome.
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/viking-enterprise-s...
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#37"Attests the software version is the version that is valid and shipped by the Oxide Computer Company" So in other words these servers will implement restrictive code signing practices and will be vendor-controlled, not owner-controlled? This is not my idea of "secure", and really in the wake of things like the Solarwinds or RSA hacks it shouldn't be anyone's idea of secure. Vendor-holds-the-keys is not an acceptable…
"Attest" refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#REMOTE-ATTES..., not forced code signing
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#38Congrats Oxide team! More competition in this space is always a good thing. I'm curious about management. Can the rack operate completely standalone? I assume when you have multiple there will be some management abstraction above the rack layer? The closest direct equivalent that I can think of to this is AWS outposts. Are there any others that I'm forgetting?
There are a bunch of enterprisey "private cloud" aka "converged infrastructure" racks like VxRack, Nutanix, etc.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#39Why are we hard coupling the hardware to the software? The whole secret of the success of M1 and ARM in servers is that lots of software has long ago stopped being hyper-aware of what hardware it is running on. What software are we talking about anyways? It's all incredibly vague, but it seems to reach all the way into the Kubernetes sphere. Why would I run this over something I can use on my next job?
Is Apple really a good counterexample for the success of integrating software and hardware?
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#40Who is the target buyer?
Is this to compete against Nutanix / VCE?