These comments/upvotes feel astroturfed and any negative/questioning comments are heavily downvoted.
Oxide raises $200M Series C
261–270 of 355 posts
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electr…
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me i…
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.
There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.
For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me i…
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market. There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons. For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments,…
Surely vmware licenses are more easily replaced via Proxmox? Why would you care about Oxide, which is a hardware vendor?
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#264I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too. I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I s…
After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision. Total chaos.
FWIW there's equal pay but it's not a flat structure
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume…
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400. I've heard Bryan and Co. call it a "mainframe for Zoomers," but it's much closer to what Nutanix or VxRail is/was doing than it is to an AS/400.
It's not really a mainframe because the RAS story (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) story is sorely lacking compared to what a true mainframe gives you. So a midrange machine like AS/400 is probably a better comparison.
An AS/400 has a similar RAS story to mainframes than to Oxide/Dell. Oxide is closer to Dell (Oxide RAS is effectively the same as any sled hyperconverged) than they want to admit.
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#267I say this every time Oxide comes up, and I know that I will never get my wish, but if they ever ventured into the "homelab" market with smaller products, they can have all my money.
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market. There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons. For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments,…
Surely vmware licenses are more easily replaced via Proxmox? Why would you care about Oxide, which is a hardware vendor?
Proxmox is fine if your vmware deployment was quite small. Single oxide rack at max density is going to similar values as official scaling sizes for proxmox, and very much isn't limit of what we did with vsphere.
And Oxide sells a complete hardware + software solution, including virtualization and SDN - essentially it's a physical equivalent of up to 32 node virtualization cluster per rack, with builtin SDN and SD-SAN, that already has features to combine for more.
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
It’s going to blow your mind that many processes at many businesses are horribly inefficient and waste buckets of human time.
Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
You would need 3-phase power too. At 208V and 15kW it'll draw over 70A peak :P. If you can wire that up in your living room, I raise my glass to you!
I'll take the challenge if it gets me Oxide hardware!