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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#571

Post by jjav »

yencabulator wrote: post #510
growse wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us who've bought large "turn-key" solutions from Dell etc. have often discovered that it's actually just a cobbled-together bunch of things which may or may not work well together on a good day, depending on what you're trying to do. Just because it's all got the word "Dell" written on it, doesn't mean that the components were all engineered by people who were working together to build a single working syste…

Same is true of Oxide, it'll be up to actual experience to see how well it works. Oxide seems to have written their own distributed block storage system ( https://github.com/oxidecomputer/crucible ), have their own firmware, kernel and hypervisor forks, etc -- when any of that breaks, good luck!

> Oxide seems to have written their own ...

> when any of that breaks, good luck!

The premise is that you don't need luck, you can call Oxide. As you said, they wrote all of it, so they own all the interaction so they can diagnose all of it.

When I call Dell with a problem between my OS filesystem and the bus and the hardware RAID, there's at least three vendors involved there so Dell doesn't actually employ anyone that knows all of it so they can't fix it.

Sure, Oxide now needs to deliver on that support promise but at least they are uniquely positioned to be able to do it.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#573

Post by qaq »

aeyes wrote: post #431
qaq wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.

Maybe something like Dell VXBlock didn't exist when they pitched their idea? Any hardware contracts are very long term and you'll have a hard time getting me to switch to a different vendor, especially when they also want to come in with an unknown operating system which I have to run.

I guess time will tell VXBlock just looks like amalgamation of SKUs Dell has. Oxide was built as "clean slate" from firmware to every minute detail to offer a compelling product for companies that want to have a hyperscaler style systems for their on-prem workloads.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#574

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

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…

Every single one of the companies you listed started off with unverified hardware, some that failed in the field and continues to today. Why wouldn't you try something else, considering the status quo? This is a nothing-to-lose situation as long as you don't put all your chips into the bet. Every single datacenter has capacity and a need to diversify. It's not even a heroic feat of risk taking.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#575

Post by layer8 »

omarfarooq wrote: post #501
layer8 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it harder to compete with them is a good thing for Oxide, obviously, and therefore why it provides negative incentive for them to publicly advertise pricing.

It's not rocket computer science to spin up a pseudo-consulting entity [that works with larger enterprises] to get on sales call for competitive intelligence.

It’s still harder, and you’ll only get a single price point at a time, which also might change three months later.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#576

Post by Kranar »

dmix wrote: post #164
yardie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren't sure the of the business case.

I don’t know anything about buying servers, is that expensive?

Let's just say I hope I am interpreting something incorrectly, because if 500k is the minimum price and you match it to the minimum configuration found here:

https://oxide.computer/product/specifications

Then yeah, it's ridiculously expensive.

That said compared to competitors it's in the right ballpark, but I have no idea how companies manage to spend so much money for this stuff. I am the founder of my own tech startup and I remember when I was looking at storage solutions and building out computing clusters there were companies charging absolutely insane prices.

I literally just spent about a week of my own time studying and learning as much as I could about it on my own and ended up building out my own custom solution for about 20-25% of the price these other companies were charging. I remember hearing people trying to scare me out of it saying if I did my own solution I'd need to hire full time operations people, and I'd always have to worry about things breaking and maintenance or headaches and nightmares etc...

It's been over 10 years now and absolutely no headaches, no nightmares, and very very minimal maintenance is needed.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#577

Post by tinco »

yencabulator wrote: post #503
eduction wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Yes they are using illumos/Solaris to host this but they don't sell on that, they sell on the functionality of this layer — allowing people to deploy to owned infra in a way that is similar to how they'd deploy to AWS or Azure. How much do you ever think about the system h…

> When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Now you need to know both the OS they chose and the OS you chose... (No, I don't believe it'll be 100% hands-off for the host. This is an early stage product, with a lot of custom parts, their own distributed block storage, hypervisor, and so on.)

This true for other hypervisors too. Enterprises are still paying hundreds of millions to VMware, who knows what's going on in there?

I wouldn't have picked Opensolaris, but it's a lot better than other vendors that are either fully closed source, or thin proprietary wrappers over Linux with spotty coverage and you're not allowed to touch the underlying OS for risk of disrupting the managed product.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#578

Post by glitchcrab »

keepamovin wrote: post #253
dewey wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hey, nice resources, man! Thank you. No worries that you can't decide on the amounts, it's OK :)

My employer takes cost of living into account by multiplying your salary by the numbeo factor for where you live. Base salaries are all calculated for Cologne (HO) and then adjusted by the relative cost of living factor for your locale. (we're entirely remote)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#579

Post by bjackman »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #350
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…

You may not be aware of the pain that many large, non-software companies currently have on AWS. Gigantic monthly bills (hundreds of thousands per month) coming from subdivisions that aren't capable or motivated to reduce their AWS budget or usage. To the office of the CTO, Oxide's value proposition (buy instead of rent) could be very motivating. "Hey subdivision A, could we buy a few Oxide racks and move your workloa…

If those subdivisions aren't capable of reducing their AWS usage how do you imagine that they are capable of migrating to an Oxide rack?

Or in other words, is migrating to Oxide somehow assumed to be easier than migrating to some other non-locked-in cloud infrastructure?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#580

Post by throw0101c »

panick21_ wrote: post #375
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 are a competitor to the 'HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged)' part of this. They basically saying 'we will do it better'. Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. > Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trus…

> Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it.

As someone who has dealt with mostly Debian and Ubuntu in recent years, every time I had to deal with even small numbers of RHEL licenses I often asked myself "Why do put up with this?" (I know why, but still… such overhead.)

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