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Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

oxide.computer

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Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#151

Post by rbanffy »

wmf wrote: post #33
rbanffy wrote: post #30

Looks 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.

The OS can still do cost-based memory allocation considering the latencies of going between nodes. These Milan chips have tons of memory controllers for local memory and compute nodes can allocate all those PCIe channels to talk to a shared memory module (IBM's OMI goes in that direction - a little bit of extra latency, but lots of bandwidth and ability to go a little bit further than DDR4/5 can go). I think the bigger POWER9 boxes do this kind of thing. Migrating processes to off-board cores is silly in this case, but core/socket/drawer pinning can go a long way towards making this seamless while enabling applications that wouldn't be feasible in more mundane boxes.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#152

Post by etcet »

alberth wrote: post #40

Who is the target buyer? Is this to compete against Nutanix / VCE?

We use Nutanix where I work and this has made everyone very excited. Though they would need something similar to Nutanix CE to make us switch entirely (i.e. the ability to run non-production unsupported on commodity hardware).

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#153

Post by rbanffy »

zozbot234 wrote: post #99
e12e wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan9 on an oxide rack might get you close to an SSI work-a-like - but I think it's unlikely it'd be a practical use of the hw?

AIUI, Plan9 is not quite fully SSI. It is a distributed OS, and gets quite close, but it's missing support for distributed memory (i.e. software-implemented shared memory exposing a single global address space); it also does not do process checkpointing and auto-migration, without which you don't really have a "global" system image.

Mosix and VirtualIron worked at a time 1GBps ethernet was in its infancy. Today 10GBps are consumer grade and 40GBps can go over Cat 8 copper, roughly equivalent to a DDR4-4000 channel.

Not great, but this is near COTS hardware. They can do significantly better than that.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#154

Post by ohazi »

> Our firmware is open source. We will be transparent about bug fixes. No longer will you be gaslit by vendors about bugs being fixed but not see results or proof.

There are lots of reasons to be enthusiastic about Oxide but for me, this one takes the cake. I hope they are successful, and I hope this attitude spreads far and wide.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#155

Post by zozbot234 »

rbanffy wrote: post #151
wmf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, single system image is really expensive (see Superdome Flex) and most workloads can't justify that cost.

The OS can still do cost-based memory allocation considering the latencies of going between nodes. These Milan chips have tons of memory controllers for local memory and compute nodes can allocate all those PCIe channels to talk to a shared memory module (IBM's OMI goes in that direction - a little bit of extra latency, but lots of bandwidth and ability to go a little bit further than DDR4/5 can go). I think the bigg…

> The OS can still do cost-based memory allocation considering the latencies of going between nodes.

That's a rather seamless extension of what OS's have to do already in order to deal with NUMA. Pinning can definitely be worthwhile since the default pointless shuttling of workloads across cores is already killing performance on existing NUMA platforms. But that could be addressed more elegantly by adjusting some tuning knobs and still allowing for migration in rare cases.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#156

Post by slownews45 »

How can they offer a secure boot solution under the GPLv3 - my understanding is the anti tivoization clauses means they need to release their keys or allow admins and hackers and others to escape the secure boot chain if they are physically in front of the machine or own the machine.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#157

Post by atonse »

paxys wrote: post #146
atonse wrote: post #9

This looks interesting (although I'm not in the target market, too small)... But if I were looking at this, judging from the quality of people they've amassed in their engineering team, is there any chance they won't be acquired in 6 months? To anyone looking to take a bet on this, what is the answer to "what's your plan for when your stellar team gets acquired?" And what answer will satisfy that buyer? Update: Addin…

Going by that logic, you should never take a chance on a bad company because they are bad, and a good company because they are too good and might get acquired. So should you just never rely on a small company for anything?

That's the question I was genuinely asking. Do longer-term minded buyers think this way? Our company is too small and just use AWS, we're just not perspective buyers. But I'm trying to understand the mindset of a CapEx style buyer whose timelines are multiple years.

This team is, by all measures, going to hit it out of the park. There's just a solid amount of talent, experience and insight all-round.

And to be clear, I am not at all disparaging teams that get acquired – that would be silly. I'm just saying that we are in an environment these days where very few of these kinds of companies get a chance to grow before being acquired and WE are the ones that lose even though the people working at the company rightfully earn a nice payout.

I have the same "fear" about Tailscale, a company whose product we love and have started using, and are about to purchase.

But the fact that a member of the founding team themselves answered my message above in plain english (not surprising), is honestly refreshing.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#159

Post by atonse »

bcantrill wrote: post #110
atonse wrote: post #9

This looks interesting (although I'm not in the target market, too small)... But if I were looking at this, judging from the quality of people they've amassed in their engineering team, is there any chance they won't be acquired in 6 months? To anyone looking to take a bet on this, what is the answer to "what's your plan for when your stellar team gets acquired?" And what answer will satisfy that buyer? Update: Addin…

Hi! So, at every step -- from conception to funding to building the team and now building the product -- we have done so to build a big, successful public company. Not only do we (the founders) share that conviction, but it is shared by our investors and employees as well. For better or for ill, we are -- as we memorably declared to one investor -- ride or die. Also, if it's of any solace, I really don't think any of…

That is awesome to hear. :-) Wishing you all a ton of success!

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#160

Post by twoodfin »

gjvc wrote: post #105

0xide Computer Company deserves to do well. This is a solid private-cloud play aimed at those corporations (probably mainly financials, but other sectors too I'm sure...) who don't want to outsource to the likes of AWS / GCP.

Not just “don’t want to”, I’d hope: They should be able to win on the economics, too, assuming customers that care more about TCO for a fixed or steady-growing workload rather than elasticity.
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