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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#861

Post by hulitu »

nickik wrote: post #103
NKosmatos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second that, they should make it clear what they're selling and what they have to offer. Every company should have this in their main/landing page... If I can't understand what you're selling/offering in 30sec, then I'm not interested :-) If you take some time and read around their site you'll see that they're offering a ready to run (turnkey) server. They have everything packed together, they've integrated ever…

Literally on the main page there is a picture of a big computer. And then it says: Oxide Cloud Computer No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud. Contact Sales How much easier can they make it? They clearly want to sell computers.

> Literally on the main page there is a picture of a big computer. And then it says:

So it is big, it looks good, but no specs. What architecture ? Some "cinebench" numbers ...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#862

Post by linklocaladdr »

electroly wrote: post #300
EvanAnderson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On prem. Reliable and inexpensive network connectivity they has any resemblance to a 10G LAN doesn't exist where I am. I work with some businesses who need very, very reliable, high-bandwidth, and low latency connectivity to their data. The amortized cost of on-prem beats the cost of any off-prem offering as soon as the cost of the necessary connectivity is factoted-in.

AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.

I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#863

Post by cprecioso »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #753
jpdb wrote: post #22

I really wish oxide had a Homelab/consumer centric offering! Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3/4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds. I have thought about building one myself, but it's a large investment of time that I can't seem to find lately.

Unfortunately they are not planning home lab things anytime soon, per a recent podcast episode [0]. If you want to play around with their Hubris OS: "You wanna buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris, and then you’ve got – you’ve got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks.” [0] https://changelog.com/friends/8

Maybe somebody can help me find the $20 one, but the one I can see is $460

https://estore.st.com/en/stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html

Re: The Cloud Computer

#864

Post by mlindner »

bcantrill wrote: post #860
mlindner wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side question, what's the name of your custom firmware that is the replacement of the AGESA bootloader? I tried searching on the oxide github page but couldn't find anything that seemed to fit that description.

(The AGESA bootloader -- or ABL -- is in the AMD PSP.) In terms of our replacement for AGESA: the PSP boots to our first instruction, which is the pico host bootloader, phbl[0]. phbl then loads the actual operating system[1], which performs platform enablement as part of booting. (This is pretty involved, but to give you a flavor, see, e.g. initialization of the DXIO engine.[2]) [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/p…

Thanks, are the important oxide branches of illumos-gate repo (and any other cloned repos) defined anywhere? I definitely wouldn't have found that branch without you mentioning it here.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#865

Post by mlindner »

sbarre wrote: post #523
Voultapher wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, you mention Hyper-converged, can you point to anything that comes even close to the experience you presumably get from the Oxide offering.

Part of the problem here is that the people who make the purchasing decisions (like this CTO guy) don't care about "the experience" because they're not the ones unpacking boxes and plugging in cables. They pay other people to do that and they don't really care if it's a miserable time. And if it takes days instead of hours, who cares? Rarely is someone setting up a data center under the gun (unless you're Elmo and we…

> we all saw how that went

I mean... it went quite well all considering? There was some site instability for a brief period of time and now it's back to working normally. The initial hypothesis was that the data center was vital and so couldn't be shut down quickly. Turns out the hypothesis was incorrect. So I'm not quire sure that makes the point you're trying to make.

Of course Twitter is definitely not all use cases, so trying to generalize from one data point isn't a great idea in general.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#866

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

latchkey wrote: post #838
bcantrill wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if we're talking metaphorical fans or literal ones but assuming the latter: replacement is covered under warranty. And for me personally, the "amazing shift" that you describe was in fact a decade-long experiment that left me with an inescapable conclusion: commodity hardware cannot, in fact, do the job -- and not for lack of trying!

Hi Brian, thanks for the response. Metaphorical fans, but also fans, and everything else. It was an example from the blog post. I looked at that super innovative and cool backplane. Sure, warranty covers it for the first N years, but then what? What happens when things turn into a Tesla situation and you get horror stories of delays and poor results? I think 'commodity' is generalized at this point. Given the choice…

You are ignoring the software stack, which is where a huge portion of the value-add is found.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#867

Post by Fischgericht »

wpm wrote: post #842
Fischgericht wrote: post #837

I know that many might have by now forgotten how an actual data center works. "One size fits all" will never work. Here are the main headaches that someone who actually runs a data center will run into: - How many power circuits does the DC provide you? What voltage? AC or DC? - How many amps do the circuits have? Is the PDU provided by the DC, or do you provide it? - How many upstreams will you have? Dual core route…

Many of your questions have answers in TFM: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction

Part of the power distribution question is answered, in a way that gives even more concerns, though. A single DC distribution without redundant PSUs? What if one of the servers trips a fuse?

By the way, the list of questions would go on. At least over here, DCs offer different rack footprints. They don't even list their footprint.

But most importantly: The TFM doesn't say "There is an experienced network engineer in the box that you will own and that will do the maintenance". Unless this is provided, this will blow up.

Again: I can imagine that they find a hand full of managers buying into this. Up until the date the first few of their racks have burned down a DC, or got hacked and all customer data stolen.

Come on, this is hacker news. Everybody here should know that nobody so far has found a way (not even via AI) to replace the competences many of us here have. Again, I understand that management would love to get rid of those expensive and annoying nerds, but the ACTUAL REALITY is: An unmaintened rack in a DC will go down in flames, and management people will be in tears.

So, let's just be realistic: Oxide is simply a terrible idea that will blow up. But I congratulate them for VCs falling for this.

Now, let's find a VC that is funding someone doing an IPMI system that is not shit, does not have access to all data of the server, and does not get hacked within 5 minutes after deploying it. That would address an ACTUAL need.

Sometimes it makes sense to ask those who you hope your future customers could be.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#868

Post by Aerbil313 »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #508
cashsterling wrote: post #442

I've been following Oxide since they formed and I really hope they crush it. Semi-sort-of related... there was an automation company, Bedrock automation, that went defunct about a year ago. Their PLC hardware ideas were dope but I always felt like they were missing the boat a little bit by supporting stale PLC programming languages. I used to wonder if supporting Rust and Ada on these PLC's would be been a good idea…

The industrial automation industry is highly risk adverse. In some systems, like safety, this mentality is justified without proper migration plans. In other areas, it's alarming, like choosing to run a system on hardware that has been out of support for 30+ years without adequate spare parts. Operation/Shop floor technologies (OT) are treated like mechanical equipment, "When it fails, we'll swap it out for a new one…

What is the real solution for highly complex technology like IT, as end times are coming?

It's a critical issue. Resources are wasted, and soon we won't be able to waste as much as we did, as the abundance era is coming to an end. The desire and need for higher efficiency through highly complex technology is only to increase, as the population gets older and older.

I can easily see mandatory IT training (like the current mandatory army training in some countries) and states standardizing certain technologies to avoid fragmentation and thus freezing progress, for good reasons. Like forbidding any database to be used in production except 3 most complete ones or banning all web frameworks except React and Svelte (arbitrary). It's not that they won't want progress, but they won't be able to afford progress and the resulting skill fragmentation in the IT workers while people are hungry and money is ever tighter.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#869

Post by emsign »

> Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.

I absolutely dread that future. I want all my computation back to be local, doesn't matter to me if I own the cloud computer or not as long as I also don't own the environment it is embedded in. If the connection to it isn't mine and neither is its source of power then I don't really control "my" cloud computer.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#870

Post by Xymist »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #702
Xymist wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't even tell you how much a rack will cost. Infuriating typically B2B "talk to Sales so we can decide exactly how much we can get out of you and segment the market on the fly" approach persists even here, it seems.

I wouldn’t expect anything else for a full rack in this segment: it’s going to be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and big enough that there will be some inevitable negotiation about prices.

That doesn't mean you can't have a thin spec builder and a pricing page, even if what that mostly gets used for is devs putting together a comparison of that to a cloud deployment or similar and taking that to the procurement department to argue it's worth opening the conversation.
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