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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#101

Post by linsomniac »

linsomniac wrote: post #99
XorNot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too. Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never. So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware. But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does…

You're right, even though I did have a good use-case for them. Back in 2000-~2020 I built a "boutique linux hosting" provider, and the Supermicro "Twin^2" servers really fit our use case. We were mostly serving small dedicated servers and were very price sensitive. Loved the idea of blade servers, but they were targeted to people who needed very high compute in small footprints, and we both didn't have high compute r…

Aside: we were also one of the first VM providers, I see on the Wayback Machine we were offering it in Feb 2005, predating Digital Ocean by at least 6 years. I've regretted not marketing and selling that service much more widely. It was a side project and we had a lot of irons in the fire at the time, so we didn't focus on it very much.

It was implemented with User Mode Linux, a Linux kernel ported to run under Linux instead of ported to a bare machine. A crazy idea, but it worked REALLY well. I remember finishing up the sign-up and billing software on the plane on the way to US PyCon where we announced the service, though I don't remember the year.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#102

Post by wmf »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #98
andrewl-hn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could edit my post. Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the sh…

Cabling, plumbing, etc, aside, all the "blade servers" I've ever worked with were still glorified IBM PC's. They still have BMC's strapped to legacy interfaces pretending to be decades-old hardware allowing for "headless" operation of a platform originally intended to be a single-user computer on a desk with a monitor and keyboard, etc. That's what's so cool about Oxide's boxes to me-- the legacy garbage is gone and…

FWIW the original IBM BladeCenter platform was developed before BMCs so it had a much smaller service processor per blade connected over an out of band RS-485 management bus to a chassis management module. It was closer to Oxide than what's being sold today. And then "Windows needs VGA" kicked in.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#103

Post by wmf »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #93
andrewl-hn wrote: post #15

This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight . Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why? Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart…

I wish I could edit my post. Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the sh…

Speaking of the army, it's not clear that the extremely narrow feature set of Oxide justifies the engineering effort required.

The storage market used to be dominated by Oxide-style vertical integration and bespoke engineering and almost every vendor has transitioned to modularity over the last 20 years. Pure Storage seems to be doing OK with custom hardware though, so maybe the rest of the industry just has a lack of courage.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#104

Post by FireBeyond »

bcantrill wrote: post #57
thraway3837 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees. Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks c…

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to…

> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted.

> That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?

Your response is not a response to the OP's claim. The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-process. And that others said the same.

But even beyond that, your response doesn't align with your own careers page's "Hiring Process":

> If candidates aren’t advanced into interviews by the process outlined in [rfd147], an explicit rejection should be sent. The level of oversubscription for Oxide roles means that this rejection will likely be non-specific — which is naturally frustrating for applicants that have put a lot of energy into their materials. Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.

Which would be in alignment:

> Decency

> We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.

Here you just come off quite defensive, and argue that you at are Oxide are "very clear about" things that you say quite the opposite about on the very directions you tell candidates to read.

If what you say is true - and I can absolutely believe it is - fine, update the docs and the site. But don't come here and gaslight people into "I don't understand the problem. We're very clear, we've been very clear, people should not be complaining about this."

Source: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#105

Post by baby_souffle »

XorNot wrote: post #86
baby_souffle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock. I am sure that supermico had something like this as well

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too. Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never. So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware. But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does…

> Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).

Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.

Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#107

Post by eep_social »

kevinrineer wrote: post #35

I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.

Interop standards for this like Open19 are not widely deployed and without interoperability it’s a dead end since you need the hosting provider to give you the drop to your rack or cage. Hyperscalers I don’t know, but I’d guess they don’t deploy rack density that calls for liquid cooling yet.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#108

Post by sgarland »

jjice wrote: post #6

I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware. Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show. I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over th…

Oxide is literally the only company where I have found zero reasons why I would be unhappy to work there. I have listened to many, many podcasts, read RFDs… it always seems like a place I would thrive. To that end, I have applied twice in the last few years; unfortunately declined both times, but to be fair, the first time I didn’t know any Rust, and the second time, I was learning it.

I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#110

Post by sgarland »

marshray wrote: post #48
thraway3837 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees. Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks c…

I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours". Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?

I don’t remember for my first application; probably a few hours. My second application was 27 pages, of which you can attribute a few to the pre-existing template. I spent probably 10-15 hours on it, spread across several evenings.
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