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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#801

Post by airtonix »

uecc wrote: post #751
leetrout wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

iPhone was truly transformative. This just seems like a twist on hyper-converged infrastructure + open source. I mean, I love their design. I just don’t think it’s special enough to warrant mass adoption. And I certainly wouldn’t be deploying at scale in an enterprise environment with zero widespread adoption. Small entities will just use cloud same as always. Large companies have a multitude of unique needs that won…

[dead]

Re: The Cloud Computer

#803

Post by steveklabnik »

acyou wrote: post #784

Couple questions: 1. Are there integrator companies that take these building blocks and build datacenters for other companies? 2. Are these racks intended to be bought in large quantities and put into new datacenters? 3. Is liquid cooling an option? 4. Do you sell datacenters as well as just the racks? Do you have any of your own datacenters built out? 5. Tough question: if these are so competitive and good for your…

1. Not yet, we’ll see what the future holds

2. Eventually, right now we are just starting, so working closely with customers and in small quantities, but eventually that is the idea.

3. No. We are already doing very well with fans, the design means a very tiny power draw. The racks are quite quiet.

4. No.

5. Selling hardware and running a private cloud are two different businesses. The public clouds don’t also sell servers. We don’t plan on running a cloud, even if doing so would be a nice experience, we have to focus on what we’re doing.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#804

Post by mixmastamyk »

endisneigh wrote: post #651
leetrout wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You must have missed the "beleaguered" era.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#805

Post by usefulcat »

yencabulator wrote: post #769
mbakke wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone had this mindset we would be running our workloads on Microsoft Windows by now. GNU/Linux was also "risky" at some point.

Linux grew up in the bedrooms of teenagers. It was risky in the era of 486 and Pentiums. The environment and business criticality of a $1-2M rack-size computer is quite different.

Completely tangential, but this reminds me of an interview I had for my first job out of college in 1995. I mentioned to the interviewer that I had some Linux experience. "Ah, Linux" he said. "A cool little toy that's gonna take over the world".

In hindsight of course it was remarkably prescient. This from a guy at a company that was built entirely around SGI at the time.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#806

Post by steveklabnik »

astrea wrote: post #765

I think I'm missing something here. Do they sell servers or are they selling some interesting service where you can buy a server AND they physically host the machine in their own data centers? If the former, what value add do they provide over IBM/SuperMicro/[INSERT COMPUTER COMPANY HERE]? The custom OS? You could get 99% of the way there with bare-metal Kubernetes.

We are selling servers. The value is in building the entire thing, hardware and software, for purpose. This has many knock on effects, quality, debugability, the Buck stops with us, etc.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#807

Post by Fnoord »

novok wrote: post #472

With the rack being so quiet, I wonder if they would ever sell these in smaller versions for more local installations. Would be pretty niche, but it would be interesting. Same kinds of markets that ui.com tries to serve.

Yeah the rack is custom designed to be very quiet. And it was early mentioned in the article. I'm sure they thought it through... but why? Do they want people to store this in their office workspace? It seems like a niche to me? For smaller embedded devices like home appliance and the like, fanless or the option to have low or no fan speed (like modern GPUs) seems to make sense. Because they're stored in the household or office. But servers are not and if they are they're still stowed away or fans are replaced with less noisy ones. You want the fans as noisy as possible to generate as cold as possible hardware which helps to increase heat dissipation for improved performance before any throttling.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#808

Post by snuxoll »

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…

> As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources.

Have you looked at the pedigree of many of the people behind the project? I don't say this because "these guys smart", but because these guys bent over backwards for their customers when they were Sun engineers. Bryan didn't write dtrace for nothing.

> Imagine you're observing a recurring but rare I/O slowdown that seems to trigger under some certain conditions, and tell me a competent sysadmin wouldn't want to log in on all the related boxes (client Helios, >=3 server Helioses for the block store) and look at the logs & stats.

I think you're simultaneously over-estimating and under-estimating the people who will deploy this. There's a lot of companies who would want a "cloud in a box" that would happily plug hardware in and submit a support ticket if they ever find an issue, because their system engineers either don't have the time, desire, or competence (unfortunately common) to do anything more. The ones who are happy to start debugging stuff on their own would have absolutely wonderful tooling at their fingertips (dtrace) and wouldn't have any issue figuring out how to adapt to something other than Linux (hell, I've been running TrueNAS for the better part of a decade and being on a *BSD has never bothered me).

Re: The Cloud Computer

#809

Post by Always_Anon »

bobthecowboy wrote: post #652
Aachen wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oxides biggest selling point is the API, which can be manipulated with Terraform. I see no SoftIron Terraform plugin.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#810

Post by Fnoord »

nu11ptr wrote: post #131

> The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented. How is this different than colo space that has been predominant for years? Perhaps simply that it can be purchased more easily and standardized like a typical cloud VM?

It is the combination of things. Full FOSS stack, only cables being power and networking, and it being AIO package instead of conventional server rack.
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