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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#651

Post by endisneigh »

leetrout wrote: post #647
endisneigh wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your examples are strange. Framework is niche. iPhones do have the pedigree. Google Fiber is barely used. Most folks do use a supported Linux distribution, they don’t roll their own.

> iPhones do have the pedigree Not in 2007-2008 which is equivalent to Oxide today.

Apple was an incredibly well established company and the initial iPhone was not used in enterprise… it didn’t really start to take off there until iPhone 4 (2010-2011).

Not to mention the comparison is inane to begin with. Using an iPhone for your enterprise and moving your tech infra to a relatively unknown company are not equivalent at all.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#652

Post by bobthecowboy »

Aachen wrote: post #612
qaq wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being familiar with SoftIron but I would imagine there can be more than one company working in a given niche? Why would it be surprising?

The blog says they're the first

Correct. I work at SoftIron. We have several HyperCloud systems in production right now. SI has been shipping purpose-built storage systems for years as the root-comment suggests, but HyperCloud (which is closer to Oxide's product) has been in production systems in defense, banking, internationally for well over a year now.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#653

Post by samcat116 »

Always_Anon wrote: post #590
jjav wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nob…

>Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage. I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in th…

The vast majority of people only need to deploy VMs.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#654

Post by Always_Anon »

jjav wrote: post #641
Always_Anon wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage. I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in th…

> Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. I've been a Dell customer at a previous company. I know for a fact that's not true. I had a support ticket for a weird firmware bug open for two years, they could never figure it out. I left that job but for all I know the case is still open many years later. Dell doesn't know how to fix things like that because they don't design and en…

I've been a Dell customer for decades at this rate and I know for a fact it's true.

I've had support tickets open for all kinda of weird firmware, hardware, etc. bugs and they've been well resolved, even if it meant Dell just replaced the part with something comparable (NIC swap).

>Dell doesn't know how to fix things like that because they don't design and engineer the systems they sell.

Of course they do. That's like saying Oxide doesn't know how to fix stuff because they don't design the CPU, NVMe, DIMMs, etc. Oxide is still going to vendors for these things.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#655

Post by Always_Anon »

samcat116 wrote: post #653
Always_Anon wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage. I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in th…

The vast majority of people only need to deploy VMs.

It's ironic coming from a company who's CTO has harped about containers on bare metal for years. Maybe a large swath only need to deploy VMs, but the future will most definitely involve bare metal for many use cases, and oddly Oxide doesn't support that currently.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#656

Post by meithecatte »

josephcsible wrote: post #478

They say this: > While the software is an essential part of the Oxide cloud computer, what we sell is in fact the computer. As a champion of open source, this allows Oxide a particularly straightforward open source strategy: our software is all open. But their homepage says this: > As soon as power is applied to an Oxide rack, our purpose-built hardware root of trust – present on every Oxide server and switch – crypt…

I suppose we need to know if it's secure boot (tivoization), or verified boot (remote attestation).

Re: The Cloud Computer

#657

Post by bobthecowboy »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #169
MichaelZuo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what this Oxide rack is for? Your not going to find any serious hardware product with reliability guarantees, in writing, for much less than half a million anyways.

I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.

I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time.

That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#658

Post by osti »

wild_egg wrote: post #128
dewey wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really is one of these things where every employee in a cheap cost of living area will say "Exactly, man!" and people in an expensive area will see it differently because it might cap them lower than what they could get. I always find that a very naive point of view, of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side, who wouldn't. But I'm also aware that this is not how t…

> of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side It's not about what you want, it's about knowing your value. If your work is worth a SF salary then that's what you should be getting. Moving from Idaho to SF doesn't magically make you more productive. The company knows it's still getting more value from you than what you're being paid. They just want to keep more of that va…

I'm only worth as much as what people are willing to pay me. There is no inherent value in whatever I'm doing.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#659

Post by Always_Anon »

yencabulator wrote: post #557
jjav wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple supports OSX for consumers, they don't exactly surface the fact that there's BSD semi-hidden in there somewhere. That's because they own the whole stack, from CPU to GUI and support it as a unit. That's the benefit of having a product where a single owner builds and supports it as a whole. My impression of Oxide is that that's the level of single source of truth they are bringing to enterprise in-house clo…

Apple is a horrible example, with Apple when you have a problem, you often end up with an unfixable issue that Apple won't even acknowledge. You definitely don't want to taint Oxide's reputation with that association. As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources. Their computers expensive enough to be very much business critical. You'll get some support…

Exactly right, Apple is actually a poor example. Watch enough Louis Rossmann and you'll grasp just how bad some of their shit can be.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#660

Post by dasil003 »

yencabulator wrote: post #642
jjav wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the same premise as with all "turn-key" solutions. If it didn't come with software support, it wasn't really turn-key. Just about any company will sell your company a support contract. The more interesting question is, can they back it up with action when push comes to shove? I suspect most people have plenty of stories of opening support tickets with big name vendors that never get resolved. And through the…

Skill-wise, yes for sure (except perhaps for storage -- I haven't heard them talk about that much). Bandwidth wise, though? I used to work for a company targeting Fortune 500s. At that level of spend, when a client had a problem, somebody got on a plane. Only a fraction of those problems escalated all the way to R&D, which is where Oxide skills are. That's where VMWare etc are hard to beat.

The premise is that the bandwidth needed will be orders of magnitude less, because the engineering will be orders of magnitude better. The opportunity makes sense as we've long been climbing up the local maximum peak of enterprise sales driven tech behemoths built on a cobbled together mix of open source and proprietary pieces held together with bubblegum.

Can an engineering first approach break into the cloud market? Hard to say as enterprise sales is very powerful, and the numerous "worse is better" forces always loom large in these endeavours. That said, enterprise sales driven companies are fat, slow and complacent. Oxide is lean and driven, and a handful of killer use cases and success stories is probably enough to sustain them and could be the thin end of the wedge on long-term success. We can hope anyway.

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