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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#411

Post by aeyes »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #396
steveklabnik wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone else's software is running the hardware Our stack is open source. > what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite? The difference is not where it runs, it's that you own our racks, rather than rent them. In the traditional cloud, you're renting. Other vendors who sell you hardware will still have you paying software licensing fees, so it never feels like you truly own it. We don't have any licen…

First let me say I really like this part of your guys narrative: you have really strong opinions about how infrastructure and IT should work at many levels, like technically and aesthetically, that seems real and nice and likable. Focusing on just this financial narrative you're weaving, what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that work financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but it's just AWS? $1m buys…

I have to agree with much of this, if you need something that feels like "the cloud" but on-premise then you could have used OpenStack for the last 10 years.

The only reasons to use Oxide racks are that you get an all-in-one solution and they don't charge you a subscription fee, you only pay upfront for the hardware once. But if this company goes public one day shareholders will surely push for a subscription based licensing model.

I have yet to see the benefit of "custom software" for "custom hardware". To me it looks like a liability, if Oxide stops to exist tomorrow you'll be left with a hunk of metal which is a dead end. The software being open source doesn't change that, if you have enough manpower to support such software on your own then you can surely support any other more flexible solution.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#412

Post by jeffbee »

syntheticgate wrote: post #395
jeffbee wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

At a certain point in EE power design you don't really want to go from 54V -> point of load for every rail (1.8V, 1.1V, 0.9V, SVI3 rails etc), so sticking with an intermediate voltage makes sense often even when viewing this from an efficiency perspective. Voltages such as 54V require different creepage and clearance requirements, so saddling every point of load regulator (of which we have many many!) with those requ…

It's certainly the current mainstream style to have an intermediate voltage rail of 12V or more. But this OCP talk from a few years ago was interesting, showing a prototype direct 48V-1V conversion with high efficiency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQHiKIfrwI0

Re: Our $100M Series B

#414

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

renewiltord wrote: post #384
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much more than just slapping servers in racks when you reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in server hardware. Good control plane software makes a night and day difference.

Admittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of thousands…

It's a random sequence.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#415

Post by manquer »

ang_cire wrote: post #202

Good for them! I used to walk my dog past their (office? warehouse?) in Emeryville, and when the weather was warm they'd have the doors open and the giant server stacks just sitting there, looking awesome. I guess it's not really a concern that someone will steal something that looks like it'd take a forklift to move. The ultimate aspirational homelab setup, ngl.

Vandalism / sabotage would still be a concern even if theft isn’t ?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#416

Post by hinkley »

bcantrill wrote: post #212
chubot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"? I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project https://github.com/opencomputeproject Google definitely rebuilt the sta…

We didn't use anything from OCP. When we first started the company, we thought we might use the enclosure (and considered ourselves "OCP inspired"), but there ended up being little value in doing so (and there was a clear cost). And on the stuff that we really cared about (e.g., getting rid of the traditional BMC), we were completely at odds with OCP (where ASPEED BMCs abound!). So in the end, even the mechanical and…

My read on the situation is that you copied OCP only inasmuch as OCP made some observations about physics and you made the same observations.

The most obvious change is that you guys use half-width, full length enclosures.

But I'm realizing now that I haven't looked at the OCP specs in a long, long time. I recall the common DC rail from some early Facebook papers on this topic, and I thought they were pretty similar to how you plug into power.

I just looked at the OCP power connector, and I would have lost any bet anyone was willing to make me about what they looked like. That's not at all where I thought we were. I think I understand now why you guys went to such pains getting the keyed connectors to work exactly right. Their power connectors look like something from a scifi movie, and not in a good way.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#417

Post by TZubiri »

yencabulator wrote: post #342
TZubiri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, their servers are mostly hypervisors, so the interface is mostly any virtual machine. You can "just" migrate by exporting or importing the vms.

You're literally ignoring that the Oxide management stack is very much custom and effectively vendor-locking the purchase to be maintained by them. They are not general purpose PC servers. You can "just" migrate away from Oxide but that would mean throwing away the hardware you now own. That's the grandparent's point; if you're migrating out of a cloud to avoid the margins demanded by the cloud vendor, now you're at…

This reminds me of people complaining about github being closed source and moving to gitlab, or people obsessing over terraform to avoid cloud locking.

Sure you will have vendor locking at the periferies, but the core is what's important, the guest vms. The hypervisor is whatever. If you have 100 vms running on ec2, you have done a great job of designing portable software, don't obsess over the last 1%.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#418

Post by trhway »

dpritchett wrote: post #123
mystraline wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment. If I wasn…

It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it? Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

>It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?

reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional") requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e. participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit, back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a lot of time in those sports without having to take care of making a living.

And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The ones who need money naturally can't have the required purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for money.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#419

Post by rtpg »

abustamam wrote: post #403
bobsomers wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying. For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.

I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice house and drive a nice car in Cali. Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bi…

Yeah my point is that it’s comfortable enough.

If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.

Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!

(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#420

Post by hinkley »

syntheticgate wrote: post #395
jeffbee wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

At a certain point in EE power design you don't really want to go from 54V -> point of load for every rail (1.8V, 1.1V, 0.9V, SVI3 rails etc), so sticking with an intermediate voltage makes sense often even when viewing this from an efficiency perspective. Voltages such as 54V require different creepage and clearance requirements, so saddling every point of load regulator (of which we have many many!) with those requ…

The thermal dissipation is a function of the current squared. The heat in the conductor is a function of the size of the conductor and the surface area for heat dissipation. So these high current common rail systems you can sometimes see in youtube videos for power distribution, have great honking bars of copper in them. And in most of the videos I've seen, the video is about someone screwing one of these up, damaging the bar, and now the electrician has to wait for a new one to arrive, because they are shipped from far away and they are expensive per pound, and the dumb things weigh many pounds.

So you don't actually want the power to be at 12V for very long in a power dense rack. Their spec sheet says that each rack can pull 15KW. And that's wired for 208 or 3-phase power. That's 10 hair dryers of power per rack, so yeah maybe you shouldn't step it down until the last responsible moment.

Do any parts of the rack run at the full 54V? That would make for some very nice cooling fans.

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