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Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

oxide.computer

161–170 of 264 posts

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh no, DDR4-4000 (which servers can't use BTW) is ~256 Gigabits per second. Latency is also a killer; optimized Infiniband is ~1 us which is 10x slower than local RAM at ~100 ns.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, well it isn't that dense either. As I have written, it's 32 CPUs (16x 2 CPUs). 1 TB of RAM per CPU is not that huge a deal, it's perhaps 16x 64 GB (Milan uses 8 channels, 2 DIMMs per channel is reasonable), if you consider that is 16 GB of RAM per core. In HPC, you would probably shrink it to 1/4 of the volume (half width, 1 U dual socket server). Oxide probably focuses on optimal thermal efficiency since their…

There are 32 half-width compute blades there, so probably single socket servers with 64 cores each.

It does look like it. Perhaps it is easier for maintenance, if you don't want to start with a full rack. The upgrade granularity is higher.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#163
post #100
post #88

This looks great. From a business perspective, I would be concerned that it would be hard to prevent companies like Dell from entering this space as a competitor quite rapidly.

Enterprise vendors are culturally incapable of building opinionated hardware or software. That's a moat, but which side are the customers on?

Isn’t this basically: https://www.vmware.com/products/vmc-on-dell-emc.html

Or https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html

Disclaimer vmware employee, but I dont work in this area.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#164

Looks fantastic, and the hardware specs appeal to me greatly - but I'm not sure there is an actual market outside the "cult of personality" bubble. A few SV wannabes will buy into this to trade off a Twitter relationship with the Oxide founders - but does anyone really see the IT teams at Daimler, Proctor & Gamble, Morgan Stanley... et al - actually going for this over HPE/Dell and AWS/Azure? We are a long way away f…

Like everything else, start small, and grow. If you have a good product that actually works.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#165

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.

I don't know anything, but I remember hearing it's secure boot with only their releases, if you want to run your own software it's not secure boot anymore, but you're free to run whatever you want.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#166
post #17

As 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…

My understanding is you will use a API to provision virtual machines on top of the Oxide hypervisor/software stack, which is bhyve running on Illumos. So you can still just run your favorite Linux distro or windows or a BSD if you want[1]. [1]: https://soundcloud.com/user-760920229/why-your-servers-suck-...

bhyve? what happened to the KVM port?

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#168
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise vendors are culturally incapable of building opinionated hardware or software. That's a moat, but which side are the customers on?

Isn’t this basically: https://www.vmware.com/products/vmc-on-dell-emc.html Or https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html Disclaimer vmware employee, but I dont work in this area.

Sure, but you don't own those. You're renting the hardware from HP.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#169
After the acquisition of Joyent by Samsung, who here is interested in buying an extremely locked down hardware that seems seems to be a next-gen SmartOS (provisioning etc), i.e. rethinking networking and nodes all in holistic sense.

proposition is good, history is bad

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