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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#551

Post by spamizbad »

candiddevmike wrote: post #319
qaq wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.

Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. It's one thing to be left holding the bag when a SaaS startup goes under, but when you just spent millions on gear that is now completely unsupported... eek. I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.

The fact that they're willing to absorb that risk is a strong signal they're solving a real problem. It's been a while since I've worked somewhere with on-prem hardware, but I remember long build-outs, unhelpful vendors: A RAID card firmware bug bricked our SAN. Our extremely expensive support contract gave us front-row seats to finger-pointing between the card manufacturer and Dell but ultimately no solution was provided to us. Our IT director, who was absolutely furious, basically had to twisted Dells arm to get them to send us replacement hardware. Whole thing was a giant fiasco.

This is the secret none of those existing vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) are willing to tell you: They have very limited technical expertise on what they sell you and outside of some specialized troubleshooting they can do, they'll defer to their vendors. The understanding is that you've got the intellectual horsepower on staff to cope with their various shortcomings.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#552

Post by weystrom »

apexalpha wrote: post #199
weystrom wrote: post #16

> Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location. Man I would love to work for a company like that. I don't know why more people don't set their startups like that.

Damn that's insane. As someone from Europe these salaries are just extreme. If ya'll are looking for a remote security engineer from Europe hit me up. :) For those numbers I'll walk the servers into the customers myself.

Forget the numbers, just knowing that CEO is not fucking me over to build a second vacation home is Aspen would be enough for me.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#553

Post by troupe »

cdchn wrote: post #380
steveklabnik wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously different marketing copy speaks to different people. But that is referring to how, when you buy a rack from us, you don't need to put everything together and cable it all up: you pull it out of the box, plug in networking and power, boot the thing up, and you're good to go. Installation time is hours, not days or weeks, which is the norm.

>plug in networking and power No cables, except for a few cables.

Would anyone who has actually set up a rack assume that they meant these racks were wireless with a self-contained nuclear generator?

I think their description conveys what it does just fine for the target audience.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#554

Post by brundolf »

sbarre wrote: post #526
brundolf wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely unsupported That equation changes with the entire software stack being open-source

What about the hardware?

In terms of physical hardware repairs or replacement, sure, that could be a risk when the supplier is an early-stage startup. Though I wonder if the open nature would also make it easier to create eg. third-party sleds

Re: The Cloud Computer

#555

Post by jjav »

necovek wrote: post #490
Voultapher wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.

Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. And Canonical played with a cluster-in-a-box all the way back in 2013-2014: https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-unde... You could turn it into an OpenStack cloud in ~20 min…

> Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case.

Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix?

If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nobody. Everyone points fingers at the other 4 and ignore your calls.

Back in the day you could buy a fully integrated system (from CPU to hardware to OS) from Sun or SGI or HP and you had a single company to answer all the calls, so it was much better. Today you can't really get this level of integration and support anymore.

(Actually, you probably can from IBM, which is why they're still around. But I have no experience in the IBM universe.)

This is why Oxide is so exciting to me. I hope I can be in a company that becomes a customer at some point.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#557

Post by yencabulator »

jjav wrote: post #544
yencabulator wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll become customer facing the moment something doesn't work right.

When Apple supports OSX for consumers, they don't exactly surface the fact that there's BSD semi-hidden in there somewhere. That's because they own the whole stack, from CPU to GUI and support it as a unit. That's the benefit of having a product where a single owner builds and supports it as a whole. My impression of Oxide is that that's the level of single source of truth they are bringing to enterprise in-house clo…

Apple is a horrible example, with Apple when you have a problem, you often end up with an unfixable issue that Apple won't even acknowledge. You definitely don't want to taint Oxide's reputation with that association.

As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources. Their computers expensive enough to be very much business critical. You'll get some support by Oxide logging in remotely to customer systems and digging around, but pretty soon the customer will want to do that themselves to monitor/troubleshoot the problems as they happen.

Imagine you're observing a recurring but rare I/O slowdown that seems to trigger under some certain conditions, and tell me a competent sysadmin wouldn't want to log in on all the related boxes (client Helios, >=3 server Helioses for the block store) and look at the logs & stats.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#558

Post by dangoor »

goldinfra wrote: post #403
fefe23 wrote: post #11

This is actually a pretty big deal. They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source. So no "sorry but the third party vendor droppe…

Coupling vs Decoupling is not some one-sided thing. It's a major trade-off. One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they're shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors. They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors that are forced to compete head-to-head for a specific role (ser…

> They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors

It seems like they're trying to hit a middle ground between cloud vendors and fully decoupled server equipment companies.

Using Oxide is likely cheaper over the life of the hardware than using a cloud vendor. A company who already has in-house expertise on running racks of systems may be less the target market here than people who want to do cloud computing but under their own control.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#559

Post by jjav »

cryptonector wrote: post #446
throw0101a wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They sell servers, but as a finished product. They sell rack-as-compute.[0] Their minimum order is one rack: You plug in power and network, connect to the built-in management software (API), and start spinning up VMs. [0] With built-in networking and storage.

It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container. Cooling, power supply, compute, storage, and network, all in a box. You supply power, a big network pipe, and the piping to external heat exchangers.

> It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container.

Sun did that experiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Modular_Datacenter

Re: The Cloud Computer

#560

Post by troupe »

DonnyV wrote: post #330
apexalpha wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that's insane. As someone from Europe these salaries are just extreme. If ya'll are looking for a remote security engineer from Europe hit me up. :) For those numbers I'll walk the servers into the customers myself.

Salary is that high in the US because we have no social net or price caps here. Your on your own for everything. Healthcare, retirement, overpriced homes, out of control rent, etc

Wouldn't an employee making that $201k salary in another country be responsible for paying all the taxes to support the socialized healthcare, etc? In other words the take home pay may be significantly less.
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