681–690 of 994 posts
Is this a big deal? I clicked on this skeptically, but...it actually seems like kind of a big deal? It is at least technically impressive, since it seems like they're eliminated a ton of datacenter pain points with the mechanical design.
It seems like they have managed to fit 32 1P servers in a 42U rack. That's pretty impressive, I have to admit. I don't think I've seen that level of density before.
I'd like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality. If you're an embedded developer go take a look at Hubris and Humility. I ended up using those to GREAT effect for this custom one-off aerospace device and it was a fantastic experience to integrate with. Definitely a change from what I was used to that took a bit of getting used to.
Yeah, I just skimmed through the reference docs for Hubris and was very impressed with what I saw. No "rocket science", just (apparently) solid technical decisions that are extremely well justified and documented. https://oxidecomputer.github.io/hubris/reference/
* Memory access is protected, but addresses are not virtually mapped. The lack of paging of course ties strongly to the inability to dynamically add tasks.
* They wish they could have read-only shared libraries (viable since there's only one address space) so they could truly be shared, but the current ecosystem assumes mutability is possible (even though in Rust mutable globals are rare).
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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?
But the point still stands. There's a lot of AWS spend happening (even after being optimized) that is frustrating when you look at the raw numbers and consider how much server capability you could outright buy for the same amount. And Oxide would make it so much easier to run a bunch of VMs (and infrastructure-as-code) than standard racked x86 servers.
Oxide appears to be a complete shoo-in for companies that used to run a bunch of VMs on racked Dell/HP servers, migrated their VMs/storage to AWS, hate their monthly AWS bills, and still have the old server rooms available.
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It'll become customer facing the moment something doesn't work right.
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…
Also, Apple is just the one who survived. Previously I'd have thought of SGI, DEC, Sun, HP, IBM, Dell some of whom survived some not.
Those three consumer products I mentioned each provide a platform for a user and business space to floroush and thrive. I expect a company doing something similar for cloud computing to want the same. But it will require some magick: momentum, money, trust. That kind of stuff, and loads of it. (With some big names behind it and a lot of FOSS they got me excited, but I don't matter.)
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Yes, those are two different things. To be super clear about it, this is referring to not needing to cable up all of the individual sleds to the rack upon installation. It doesn't mean that we recommend connecting a rack of compute to your data center via wifi.
Cdchn was hoping that it had a Starlink antenna built into the rack. :)
This is actually a pretty big deal. They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source. So no "sorry but the third party vendor droppe…
>Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch. Is this true? Can you set your own root of trust for the firmware signing key and build and deploy it yourself?
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Oracle, AWS & Azure all have "Cloud at Customer" offerings. And these offerings have existed for years. And from hardware manufacturers, Dell/VCE, Nutanix, and more "hyper-converged" infra has existed. Note: I'm not being a hater. I'm just genuinely confused. --- https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
> Oracle, AWS & Azure all have "Cloud at Customer" offerings. AFAIK they manage it for you, as if you're just a colo. Whereas oxide just hands the entire rack + software over, but with no self install of any software stacks required (such as with azure)
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> 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…
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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…
I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.
That's mostly speculation but it seems like it has to be true.
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Cogmind ( https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ ) has those sorts of animations
I've been interested in Cogmind for a while, unfortunately it only works on Windows (which seems an odd choice for a text-based game) so I have no ability to play it.