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Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

oxide.computer

181–190 of 264 posts

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be thinking that a server and a workstation are the same, ignoring that server skus need oob management, apis, hardware support and so many other things as table stakes

Did Xserve have any of that stuff?

Not all of it, and not necessarily well, which was one reason they weren't super popular except for the case you really needed Apple software. It seemed more aimed at the "I want to colocate a box somewhere and I run Apple in the office and I might also want to in the datacenter for some reason or another" rather than "this is a solid platform that offers all the bells and whistles I would expect because I'm deploying tens or hundreds or these".

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#183
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…

I was literally remarking to a workmate 'this looks like Sun 2.0', then I see who's on the team :). Congrats, I'll be keeping an eye out if you ever start shipping to Australia.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#184
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duh! I got tricked by the things near the PDU as "oh, these must be the pure-compute nodes". So maybe that's the better question: what are the 4U worth of stuff surrounding the power? More networking stuff? Management stuff? (There was some swivel to the back of the rack / with networking, but I can't find it now) Edit: Ahh! The rotating view is on /product and so that ~4U is the fiber. (Hat tip to Jon Olson, too)

Control-plane most likely, and having a mid-centered PDU probably adds to heat on the upper stack, which shortens life over time. As someone who has designed quite a few datacenters, whats more interesting to me in this evolution of computing is the reduction in cabling. Cabling in a DC is a huge suck on all aspects - plastics, power, blah blah blah - the list is long.... But there are a LOT of cabling companies that…

Oxides of silicon are used extensively in the CPU lithography process, which is where I assume their name comes from.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control-plane most likely, and having a mid-centered PDU probably adds to heat on the upper stack, which shortens life over time. As someone who has designed quite a few datacenters, whats more interesting to me in this evolution of computing is the reduction in cabling. Cabling in a DC is a huge suck on all aspects - plastics, power, blah blah blah - the list is long.... But there are a LOT of cabling companies that…

Oxides of silicon are used extensively in the CPU lithography process, which is where I assume their name comes from.

I accept your rebuttal and raise you a kitten.

https://imgur.com/gallery/dVzW0Le

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#187
post #57

It 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 h…

"But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style hardware in the DC."

If "Apple-style" means lower skilled-labor cost for maintenance - absolutely worth it.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#188
post #57

It 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 h…

The most compelling thing to roll yourself, eclectic hardware like consumer GPUs with dedicated DXR hardware, is something you can't do with this.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#189
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they're doing 2u half width nodes, so I'd strongly suspect each node is 1TB of ram, one epyc 7713p, and 10 3.2TB u.2/u.3 drives. eta: also suspect 30TB total just means they're leaving 64GB ram for the hypervisor OS on each node.

Leaving that RAM for ZFS L2 ARC perhaps? I don't think they would use Illumos as the hypervisor OS without also using OpenZFS with it. They also need some for management, the control UI, a DB for metrics and more. Btw. if I count correctly, they have 20 SSD slots per node (if a node is full width) and 16 nodes. They would need 2 TB to reach 1 PB of "raw" capacity with the obvious redundancy overhead of ~ 20%. It is a…

Some of them are the creators of Manta, an object storage based on OpenZFS.

Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you didn’t pivot to becoming a podcast company. But this looks cool I hope you drop a new episode soon

We're getting there! My second shot was yesterday, and Steve and Jess are both completely done -- so we expect to get back to the garage soon! In the meantime, fellow Oxide engineer Adam Leventhal and I have been doing a Twitter Space every Monday at 5p Pacific; so far, it's been incredible with some amazing people dropping by -- come hang out!

Any thoughts on re-listening to your previous podcasts, finding interesting topics that were either skipped or digressed from and inviting back the guests to do a Q&A style podcast? I feel there are deep wells of interesting topics to be discussed.
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