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Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

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Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get me excited? I spent 20 seconds browsing the homepage and walked away with "so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium?" But immediately got myself to "what does a server OS do anyway, doesn't it just launch VMs? You don't need Linux, just the ability to launch Linux VMs" Tell me more? :)

It's a mainframe. If you can't get excited for mainframes it'll be hard to be excited about this. IllumOS is the OS/360 to Oxide's System/360. (It won't get that popular but it's a fair enough comparison for illustrative purposes)

It's a mainframe, for people who do not, actually, know what a mainframe is or does.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#112
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really, really good point -- and is a result of the model of Linux being only a kernel (and not system libraries, commands, etc.). It means that any real use of Linux is not merely signing up for kernel maintenance (which itself can be arduous) but also must make decisions around every other aspect of the system (each with its own communities, release management, etc.). This act is the act of creating a dis…

>including much more of the system within their scope: they are not merely kernels, but also system libraries and commands. giving limited resources of the dev team it may lead to limited support of the system outside of the narrow set of officially supported/certified hardware with that support falling behind on modern hardware, as it happened with Sun, and vendor lock-in as a result into overpriced and low performi…

>that support falling behind on modern hardware, as it happened with Sun, and vendor lock-in as a result into overpriced and low performing hardware.

The Oxide hw is using available AMD SKUs for CPU.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#113

Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.

Large financial institutions surprisingly are good customers for new, still-untested computing technology. I would not get surprised if Oxide next customers were a few giant banks and funds.

In my experience, some financial institutions have a very good understanding of risk.

They are able to identify, and most importantly, quantify risk in a way that many businesses cannot.

Consequently, they're able to take risks with new hardware/software that other companies shy away from.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#114

Can anyone ELI5 what Oxide's offer is? I've looked at their website and still got no clue. Is it hardware + software I can purchase and use on-premise? Is it a PaaS / yet another cloud provider?

On-prem, fully-integrated compute and storage solution with cloud-like APIs to provision resources, all with a commitment to open source.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#115

Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.

My company looked at them, and we were very impressed with the product. The only issue was that they are built for general compute and we really needed the option for faster processors.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get me excited? I spent 20 seconds browsing the homepage and walked away with "so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium?" But immediately got myself to "what does a server OS do anyway, doesn't it just launch VMs? You don't need Linux, just the ability to launch Linux VMs" Tell me more? :)

The best elevator pitch I've heard is "AWS APIs for on-prem datacenters". They make turn-key managed racks that behave just like a commercial cloud would with all the APIs for VM, storage, and network provisioning and integration you'd expect from AWS, except made to deploy in your company's datacenter under your control.

I guess the wildcard is price.

AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc]

Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only major difference being the "in your datacenter" part. Since you own the cost of your datacenter, Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS, but how do you do that with low volume [and from the look of it not-cost optimized, but instead fairly tank-like] bespoke hardware? Feels like the pricing / customer fundamentals are going to be pretty rough here outside perhaps a few verticals.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#117

I would be interested in how did you first hear of Oxide . I somehow landed on their podcast because it covered . The podcast is for me amazeballs marketing - it does everything but sell their product (might be a good idea to add a pitch in for each out-tro!) I mean they talk about it, like “we had such a tough time getting the compiler to do something something and then veer off to discuss back in the day stories. A…

Was following @jessfraz on Twitter back then, so I got word of Oxide when they first announced it there.

Between Jess, Bryan, and Adam, it was hard to miss :-)

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#118
post #24

I'm glad this is out, i'm going to deploy this locally and learn as much about it as possible. Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thank you Oxide team!

I'm excited to see how this compares to SmartOS. I'm pretty heavily invested in SmartOS in my personal infrastructure but its future, post-Joyent acquisition, has been worrying me. I really wish I did work for an org big enough to use Oxide's gear. Not having to futz around with bogus IBM PC AT-type compatibility edifice, janky BMCs and iDRACs, hardware RAID controllers, etc, would be so unbelievably nice.

SmartOS is being actively developed since the aquisition from Joyent[1] in April 2022.

We've released a new version every two weeks post acquisition, and are continuing to develop and invest.

We also hold office hours events roughly every two weeks on Discord[2], and would love for you to stop by and ask any questions, or just listen along!

[1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f... [2]: https://discord.gg/v4NwA3Hqay

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#119

Can anyone ELI5 what Oxide's offer is? I've looked at their website and still got no clue. Is it hardware + software I can purchase and use on-premise? Is it a PaaS / yet another cloud provider?

I believe you're being downvoted because there is already a big thread about this here, though I think that's a bit unfair to you. I haven't posted in that thread yet because I wanted to let others say what is meaningful about the product to them, but this seems like a good place to put my reply. Regardless of all that: it is hardware + software you can purchase and use on-premise, that's correct.

The differentiator from virtually all existing on-prem cloud products is that we are a single vendor who has designed the hardware and software (which is as open source as we can possibly make it, by the way, hence announcements like this) to work well together. Most products combine various other products from various vendors, and are effectively selling you integration. We believe that that leads to all kinds of problems that our product solves.

Another factor here is that we only have two SKUs: a half rack and a full rack. You don't buy Oxide 1U at a time, you buy it a rack at a time. By designing the entire rack as a cohesive unit, we can do a lot of things that you simply cannot do in the 1U form factor. There is a running joke that we talk about our fans all the time, and it's true. Because our sleds have a larger form factor than a traditional 1U, we can use larger fans. This means we can run them at a lower RPM, which means power savings. That's the deliberate design choice. But we also have gained accidental benefits from doing things like this: lower RPM also means that our servers are way quieter than others. That's pretty neat. Some early prospective customers literally asked if the thing is on when it was demo'd to them, because it's so quiet. Is that a reason to buy a server? Not necessarily, but it's just a fun example of some of the things that end up happening when you re-think a product as a whole, rather than as an integration exercise.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenStack is pretty smooth sailing these days and I bet you it would be much cheaper to just get 3 FTEs for your OpenStack install than an Oxide rack

Where, exactly, are you getting these 3FTEs qualified to touch production OpenStack infra, for more than a year, where their aggregate cost is less than a rack of equipment?

The rack doesn't require FTEs?
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