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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#361

Post by wordpad »

throwup238 wrote: post #184
jillesvangurp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month. T…

I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad the pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances were $25/hr. That’s over $200k/yr for the reserved instances so within two years I’d spend enough to buy my own 8x H100 pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) plus enough to pay an engineer to b…

That's just hardware. If you need to build and maintain your own devops tooling it can balloon in complexity and cost real quick.

It would still likely be much cheaper to do everything in house, but you would be assuming a lot of risks and locking yourself in losing flexibility.

There is a reason people go with AWS over many competing cheaper cloud providers.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#362

Post by sunshowers »

yencabulator wrote: post #316
gtirloni wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is a requirement but not the only one. There are countless examples of companies building integrated solutions based off of open source projects that, when they went bankrupt, there was nobody to pick up the available pieces and continue moving the stack forward. Just pointing out that open source is not this magical escape hatch that some people think (at least not in corporate environments).

Especially so for Oxide's decidedly non-Linux setup. They are in a niche software ecosystem with practically no one else. Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/ (Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses Illumos" is cheating.)

> Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff.

I absolutely do not have a Solaris/illumos background! The first time I ever sshed into an illumos machine was my first day on the job.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#363

Post by sunshowers »

yencabulator wrote: post #345
throw0101c wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and they were able to get down to 1.2%: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q From their weblog post: > Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks…

This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel. It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware e…

Yes, we're primarily an engineering company, not a research organization.

It's also about what we don't have. We don't have a UEFI, for example, which means we don't have UEFI vulnerabilities.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#364

Post by [deleted] »

nemothekid wrote: post #309
rtpg wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200k a year. In US dollars. American dollars. Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages! “I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay th…

Focusing on the raw dollar amount is a red-herring that always comes up in these conversations. 200k is plenty! is a sleight of hand. If I am building something with 10s of millions of value and you give me 200k and expect me to shut up cause it's plenty, you are deceiving me, full stop. The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by omission. They don't all get paid the same, and while the peanut gallery may think…

[deleted]

Re: Our $100M Series B

#365

Post by jeffbee »

steveklabnik wrote: post #343
jeffbee wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the Oxide 48V architecture compare to what is known about the Google/OCP architecture? Does Oxide use single stage conversion, intermediate 12V buses, or ??

I'm not someone who works on this part of the product, but we talk a little about this stuff here: * https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power... * https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction I feel like we had a good Oxide and Friends on this too... https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringing-up... has some info about our power setup. Anyway, I barely know anything about this top…

Probably the sweet spot, since you can get to market fast with known 12V designs, but still enjoy the possibility of later announcing you've made the sled even more efficient by getting rid of the intermediate voltage!

Re: Our $100M Series B

#366

Post by [deleted] »

neom wrote: post #83

I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I…

[deleted]

Re: Our $100M Series B

#367

Post by archon810 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #327
stavros wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like you. Are you guys hiring?

We are! https://oxide.computer/careers

I just have to say this is an incredible page. Everything is well thought out and there's no BS. The salary is upfront too and everything is remote. A gold standard for hiring pages?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#368

Post by jiveturkey »

> We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing.

In exchange for your own hardware purchase cost, in practical terms also a license.

> We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party.

In exchange for an unbreakable dependency on the first-party solution.

I'm being overly aggressive because I do lurve your product and the Sun/Apple way of vertical integration is especially valuable for security ... things break at the interfaces and since you have absolute control over that, you can be actually good. Then there's the improved UX that comes with an integrated product. The root of trust work you've done is especially noteworthy, in a sea of also especially noteworthy efforts across the entire vertical product.

But I'm leery that with the absolute lock-in, and VC pressure, you might succumb to squeezing your customers a la AVGO.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#369

Post by ryao »

yencabulator wrote: post #316
gtirloni wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is a requirement but not the only one. There are countless examples of companies building integrated solutions based off of open source projects that, when they went bankrupt, there was nobody to pick up the available pieces and continue moving the stack forward. Just pointing out that open source is not this magical escape hatch that some people think (at least not in corporate environments).

Especially so for Oxide's decidedly non-Linux setup. They are in a niche software ecosystem with practically no one else. Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/ (Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses Illumos" is cheating.)

I remember many Linux fans saying that monocultures were bad until Linux became so popular that Linux was the one benefiting from a monoculture. Despite that, the rationale against monocultures still applies.

That said, Illumos is influential as an organ donor to many others. There are a number of awesome technologies in it.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#370

Post by lumost »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #340
lumost wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For early/mid stage startups - this is an awful position to take. These orgs are heavily influenced by who they hire - what you pay defines your incentive structure. Does the world class engineer or business development lead just take it easy and travel around after they join? Does the new manager push the team and business forward or prioritize stability? Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive soun…

People are paid salary and awarded equity based on supply/demand for labor, the marginal product of that labor, and the amount of risk engineers are willing to accept by joining a startup. It's an economic transaction, the same as buying office equipment and signing contracts for cloud resources. Trying to imbue mysticism into it is just asking to be lied to by your employees

There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.
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