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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#191

Post by dist1ll »

steve1977 wrote: post #142
EvanAnderson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their firmware is open source. You can pay whoever you want to maintain it. You can't do that with Dell, HP, Supermicro, and the unknowable rabbit hole of ODMs and sub-suppliers and contractors who actually make the hardware and firmware for these companies. Until you've dealt with a malfunctioning Dell or HP server and have to live with being told "we don't know why it acts that way, we'll try to get the ODM to repr…

If I have server under maintenance with Dell or HP, they would replace the server or component for me in such a case. Which would probably be a lot faster than trying to find someone who could maintain some non-standard firmware (as good as it might be). Even if I had to replace the server on my own cost it would probably still be cheaper. And it would be easy to replace because it's commodity hardware, that was kind…

Replacing hardware? Sure, they'll help. What about debugging firmware though? I'm curious how much help you would get from Dell fixing and patching complicated firmware errors. A side benefit of the openness is that firmware issues can be discussed publicly, and the patches can be upstreamed into the main repo and made available to every customer (and even competitor). This gives you the kind of network effects that you'd never see in a locked-down ecosystem.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#192

Post by wkoszek »

I regret missing the Open Source Firmware Conference--I really wanted to meet them and learn some more on what's the story here.

I know it's a brilliant team, and since ZFS/OpenSolaris/Dtrace I've known about Bryan. The product is a nicely looking product too. One thing I don't get is the target market. Who is it? Banks? Cloud vendors? Insurance companies? I think there's a part of the computer business that I don't get yet.

One guy in one of the previous HN threads here said that it's convenient to run 1 RFP for 1 box costing $1M-$2M vs running 30 RFPs for isolated components to put on the rack. Ok, I can see that. That's some argument.

But I know that Supermicro has rack assembly service. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/rack and I'm sure Dells and HPEs have the same. Does it mean that it's impossible to call them and tell them: "Excuse me, I want 2 racks, 15 systems each, top of the line AMD CPU with RAM, NVMe storage, all maxed out, and whatever fastest Juniper switches you can find. Put me VMWare vFusion on it. Ship this thing to Infomart in Texas. I have $2M here with your name on it". They won't do this for me?

Its either this, or Oxide is going to e.g.: Bank of America, and along with RFP the bank is asking: "Show me complete supply chain records, including the source code to your boot loader, drivers, and any firmware that any component on this motherboard is running". And maybe that's ... impossible these days?

I'm the startup CTO, so not the consumer base, but after DHH started posting his thing about cloud exit, I decided to explore this, and I walked the floor of 3 DCs (in SV/TX). People who walk you around the DC don't appear to care about cables, fans or noise etc. If it's longer than 1hr on the floor, they'll put Airpods in and they're done. I've seen cages that look unified, pristine, with love and affection put into cable layout, and I've seen cages that look like a total mess. It's your cage--you only go there if things break.

My last guess is that maybe Oxide rack will end up being sort of what an Apple Macbook is among cheap HP/Acer laptops from Walmart. And it'll be a shiny toy of bold bearded IT dudes who work for GEICO IT by day, but by night they scavenge eBay for used server deals and get excited about the idea of running their own private rack in their basement. They can't afford it at home, but at work they'll want their own Oxide. If you're reading this, do know I know who you are.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#193

Post by steve1977 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #152
steve1977 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if “not PC architecture” is really an advantage for many customers.

It's similar to hyperscale infrastructure — it doesn't matter as long as it looks like a PC architecture from the OS running inside a VM. The layers and layers of legacy abstraction firmware, BMC, drivers BIOS, hypervisors you get with a typical on premise Dell/HP/SuperMicro/... server motherboard are responsible for a cold start lasting 20 minutes, random failures, weird packet loss, SMART telemetry malfunctions, et…

I’m not in the bare metal/data center business anymore at the moment, but I was for more or less the last 25 years. I never had such issues. Maybe I was just lucky?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#194

Post by robertlagrant »

hotpotamus wrote: post #25
robertlagrant wrote: post #24

I'm a bit confused about them calling it a cloud computer. The primary benefit of cloud is you spend opex instead of capex. Isn't this moving back to capex again?

If they lease it to companies, would it be considered opex?

It would be interesting to buy a load of them and set up as a cloud vendor :)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#195

Post by FridgeSeal »

rob74 wrote: post #150
nickik wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally on the main page there is a picture of a big computer. And then it says: Oxide Cloud Computer No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud. Contact Sales How much easier can they make it? They clearly want to sell computers.

Yes, but... what is a "Cloud Computer"? Is it a "computer in the cloud", like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack (on which you will probably want to run your own cloud, because everybody's doing that nowadays, hence the name), like in this case? And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables? And what do you do with this "cloud computer"? Do they host i…

> like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack

I mean, the former is just the latter with some of the setup done for you no? Anyways, it’s a full server rack, with tightly vertically integrated hardware and software. Not sure if you’ve poked around the rest of their site, but it seems like their whole software stack is designed with some really nice usability and integration in mind: there’s a little half-snippet there suggesting that provisioning bare-metal VM’s out of the underlying hardware could as trivial as provisioning an EC2 with Terraform, and if that’s the case, that’s _massive_.

> And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables?

Because they’ve gone to great lengths and care to design it to not need anything extraneous IIUC. I think the compute sleds all automatically mount into some automatic backplane that presumably gives you power, cooling and networking, and then, as above, you presumably configure all that via software, as you would your AWS setup. Not an expert here though, happy to be corrected by anyone who actually knows better.

> Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you?

Presumably the latter, given they’re a hardware company, but if their software is even a 10th as good as it seems, I fully believe there’ll be a massive market for renting bare-metal capacity from them.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#196

Post by solatic »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #121
solatic wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two independent issues: capex vs. opex, and flexibility. When opex is a primary benefit of the cloud, that's specifically for start-ups and other businesses that have little working capital. The actual primary benefit of the cloud for most cloud customers is flexibility - prior to AWS adoption, getting a server provisioned could be a multi-week if not multi-month affair negotiating between devs or operators a…

The way you put it, this capex thing though is sounding like just sacrificing cashflow for some accounting sophistry. Surely the main benefit of reserved instances is lower TCO and if you can show you can afford AWS for 3 years a bank would surely loan you the money to pay upfront if you can save say 50% it is simply cheaper even with interest.

Again this goes back to flexibility. RIs necessarily take away from your flexibility. AWS and others try to grant you the flexibility anyway, by allowing you to shift RI credits between physical instances, but lower TCO is definitely not guaranteed. If you buy an RI for a server type you're not actually using, you're spending money on servers that's getting wasted compared to not actually buying the RI.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#197

Post by flumpcakes »

ls65536 wrote: post #187

As it appears Intel Capital is one of their Series A investors, I wonder if this has some bearing on the chances that there could also be an Intel CPU-based Oxide rack (or maybe individual sleds?) in the future. It seems that Oxide's product is rather tied to AMD's CPU offerings for the time being (which perhaps will serve them very well for now), and given what they've accomplished so far, I imagine it would take qu…

This is interesting as I think Intel have stopped developing Tofino, after buying Barefoot networks back in 2019.

AMD recently purchased Pensando, I'm not sure if their network chips are similar to Tofino but they seem like they are P4 compatible DPUs so they might be a good choice when migrating off of the dead Tofino platform.

So if anything Oxide will be moving further away from Intel!

I would love to work on this kind of stuff, not sure how to get started to end up working somewhere like Oxide..

Re: The Cloud Computer

#198

Post by steve1977 »

spamizbad wrote: post #185
steve1977 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The point of cloud computing is that I don't have to care where something is running and that I (theoretically) have infinite elasticity and can scale in and out as fast and much as I need to. None of that applies here.

How much you care depends on your role. As an engineer, an Oxide system works like any other cloud provider. You’re just interacting with its API and tooling like you would with Google Cloud or AWS. To someone on the IT/Operations side, obviously there are differences but theres SIGNIFICANTLY less labor required to build-out and operate an Oxide system vs a rack full of servers. The biggest difference for these peopl…

> To someone on the IT/Operations side, obviously there are differences but theres SIGNIFICANTLY less labor required to build-out and operate an Oxide system vs a rack full of servers.

But it’s also gonna be much more restricted. So I guess one could see as kind of “Apple for data centers”? Have a nice appliance and be happy as long as it runs as it should (but hope it never stops working as it should).

Re: The Cloud Computer

#199

Post by apexalpha »

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.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#200

Post by nfriedly »

aabhay wrote: post #165
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.

Works until you have to hire a designer

Why would that be a problem? Surely there are some designers willing to work for $200k.
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