Congrats to Oxide computer!
Excited to see tech startups do actual tech instead of chasing VC funded growth hacking.
I wonder what sort of enterprise customers this targets.. (definitely not for individual devs)
Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
51–60 of 264 posts
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#52Well, congrats then! I've been waiting for news (and listening to the "On The Metal" podcast) for a long while now, and this seems like a great way to push the envelope on server hardware.
(plus I suspect there will be more to come...)
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#53As for the website, some of the animations could use a spring like movement profile to feel more physical. The website also isn't reachable over IPv6, so I would be very careful with the promised IPv6 capabilities of the server too ;-)
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#54Congrats 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?
The density they're getting here is significantly higher than AWS Outposts, which is interesting. The top-end (~$600k) AWS Outposts seem to max out at around 1k CPUs and 4.5 TB RAM in a rack (e.g. 12x m5.24xlarge = 12x 384 GB), while this rack can house 2k CPUs and 30 TB (!) RAM.
Outposts seem like a solution to the problem, "for regulatory or compliance reasons we are required for data to reside and be processed within a physical space we control." For that problem, an organization that is otherwise on AWS might find Outposts to be appealing. I can imagine an engineering team's response to such a requirement as "Oh yeah? Fine, its but its going to cost you $600k per year per rack!".
I believe Oxide is attempting to capture a much broader market than that.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#55I kind of want one of these in my home, I wonder what the price range will be.
Now I just like the idea of you telling the electrician that you need a 3-phase >5kVA PDU. :)
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#56First, congrats! But second, I'd love to understand the compute vs storage tradeoff chosen here. Looking at the (pretty!) picture [1], I was shocked to see "Wow, it's mostly storage?". Is that from going all flash? Heading to https://oxide.computer/product for more details, lists: - 2048 cores - 30 TB of memory - 1024 TB of flash (1 PiB) Given how much of the rack is storage, I'm not sure which Milan was chosen (and…
Power footprint also confirms that the compute density is pretty low.
We built a few racks of Supermicro AMD servers (4 X computes in 2U), and we load tested it to 23kva peak usage (about 1/2 full with nthat type of nodes only, our DC would let us go further)
Were also over 1 PB of disks (unclear how much of this is redundancy), also in NVMe (15.36 TB x 24 in 2U is a lot of storage...)
Other then that not a bad concept, not sure of a premium they will charge or what will be comparable on price.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#57It sure looks pretty, but appears to be -
- dedicated to virtualization, done their way
- rather inflexible in hardware specs
- vendor-locked at the rack - if you have hardware from someone else, it can't live in the same cabinet
I guess if you just want a pretty data center in a box and look like what they consider a 'normal' enterprise to be, it might appeal. But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style hardware in the DC.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#58Congrats 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?
The density they're getting here is significantly higher than AWS Outposts, which is interesting. The top-end (~$600k) AWS Outposts seem to max out at around 1k CPUs and 4.5 TB RAM in a rack (e.g. 12x m5.24xlarge = 12x 384 GB), while this rack can house 2k CPUs and 30 TB (!) RAM.
it's better than that, actually, as an AWS vCPU is a hyperthread, not a full core, and these would have 4096 hyperthreads.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
for what they're advertising there, on the order of $1mm, based on underlying hardware costs.
Actually, standard Azure rack is on the order of $1.1 mm of hardware depending on SKU if I am not mistaken. So I would guess, it could be more like $2 mm. There is the aspect of management and other vendors Dell/EMC + VMware like you to pay way more than the hardware costs for e.g. VXRail/ vSphere licences. That is the real target.
And maintenance. I like the idea of having to give them a key to your house to replace a disk when the SMART alert phones home. :)
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#60As 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!
They will use Illumos with Bhyve, @bcantrill said it in a podcast just a few months ago. I have linked it somewhere in my comments (look at my profile).