Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 994 posts

Re: The Cloud Computer

#241

Post by bigironcto »

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account.

As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for.

The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible.

Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.

Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service?

Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#242

Post by eaasen »

caskstrength wrote: post #170
Youden wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's just a lot more that can be said than they wanted to fit on this one page. Specs of the switch are available here: https://oxide.computer/product/specifications

I was asking about their NIC, not switch.

The NIC is a chip-down Chelsio T6 ASIC with 2x100GbE ports, one going to each Ethernet switch in the rack.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#243

Post by repelsteeltje »

steve1977 wrote: post #193
repelsteeltje wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe you were. :-) And maybe this is not for you or me (I haven't contacted their sales, yet) it's not for everyone.

Personally, I have always been annoyed that the BIOS is clunky and every change requires a reboot, taking several minutes. As computers got faster over the years, this has gotten worse, not better. At the core of cloud economics is elasticity: don't pay for a service that you don't use. Wouldn't it be great to power down an idle server, knowing that it can be switched on seconds before you actually need it?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#244

Post by paxys »

Regardless of how good the product is, are companies really going to trust a startup with 100% of their hardware, software and support dependencies with no outside ecosystem and no interoperability with any of their existing infra?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#246

Post by dewey »

keepamovin wrote: post #223
dewey wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site is usually helpful: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Interesting, it's almost double in SV the cost of Berlin! How much salary do you think should allocate to base and how much toward any location adjustments, in general?

I can't answer that, but there's some companies that do all that in public:

- https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensat...

- https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/open-sourcing-our-pay-calcula...

- https://buffer.com/salary-calculator

Re: The Cloud Computer

#247

Post by hlandau »

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…

>Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch.

Is this true? Can you set your own root of trust for the firmware signing key and build and deploy it yourself?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#248

Post by LoganDark »

alberth wrote: post #219

> "Today we are announcing the general availability of the WORLD'S FIRST commercial cloud computer" (emphasis mine) I'm having a hard time getting past the first sentence of this blog post. Maybe I'm missing the obvious.

They're selling a rack that hosts an entire virtual cloud. Nobody has done that yet. There have been servers with hypervisors preinstalled, but nothing like this.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#249

Post by apendleton »

bigironcto wrote: post #241

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-c…

I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was complaining about why every server in the rack needs a CD drive, which was the norm from Dell), because the kinds of stripped-down, super-efficient hardware designs the hyperscalers were building weren't available to the general public, so this is that: hyperscaler-like technology for people who want to own it themselves.

I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.

Post reply on HN