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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

941–950 of 994 posts

Re: The Cloud Computer

#941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't good enough. This is a hardware play because you could theoretically take that software and run it on whatever hardware you want. You're not going with this business because of their open source software though, you're going with it because they are making innovative hardware. If you're buying millions of this stuff, what says that you're going to get support for it in 5 years. Who knows... maybe Cisco wa…

Their hardware isn't really innovative though... Even the hardware integration isn't really innovative, as others here have pointed out. My two cents is that this isn't really an innovation business model, it's an execution business model. Their proposition seems to be that they can execute a a server rack with integrated hardware and open-source software so well that customers will love their product. Maybe they'll…

Solution looking for a problem.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because oxide.computer isn't someone else's machine anymore. It's yours. That's literally why it's so exciting lol

Why would it be exciting for a company to be literally doing what lots of companies have been doing for literally 25 years?

because they do it better...?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#943
post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's since grown over the past 10 years to about 2 PB of storage. I mentioned I use rsync for backups.

rsync to where?

That's a lot more involved. We're a quant firm that have servers colocated globally at various exchanges, so our data is distributed across a lot of systems. The main and original purpose of this storage system is to provide one centralized repository of all of this global data so that we can run backtests and perform analytics locally as opposed to having to hit our Australian system when we need ASX data, and then hit our German system when we need Xetra data, etc etc...

So different backups happen in varying directions, with the colocated servers using the main storage system to back themselves up, and the main storage system in turn backing portions of itself onto the colocated servers.

Not everything gets backed up, however, and most of what does get backed up can be compressed quite significantly. We mostly just back things up that can't be recovered from third parties or that are proprietary to our organization.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be exciting for a company to be literally doing what lots of companies have been doing for literally 25 years?

because they do it better...?

Do what better? Rent out computers connected to the internet? How are they doing it better?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#945

> We’re really excited to have the first commercial cloud computer — and for it to be generally available! If you yourself are interested, we look forward to it making its first impression on you — reach out to us! Can we please stop with the "the only way to get our pricing is by booking a sales call with us." This is a 100% surefire way for me to never pay for your product, and instead go to competitors who provide…

If you think you pay a fair price buying racks of servers from dell or hp by clicking buttons on their website, you are missing out. Purchase teams in my first company buying all sorts of hardware for our datacenters would spend their days negotiating and the end price was nowhere near the price listed online.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#946

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them Lol. Bro.

I'm not even the target market for this and I completely understand the feeling there. There's a lot of people who just have no conception of computing hardware anymore. People who are tied to AWS and have spent their entire careers working with AWS and now simply believe with a passion that "that's just how it is" as AWS continues to raise prices while their own cost of compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper.…

Yep. The real world is still far from being fully hosted in the cloud. I've been in a few places which would massively benefit from Oxide's approach. Also I'm a fan of the team from the joyent days so probably I'm biaised. But I've seen a few poor implementations of the "private cloud" and oh boy, I wish well from the people who will maintain that in the long run...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#947
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I think this is the interesting question. My (naive, uninformed) interpretation is that Oxide is betting that there is some area in the overlap of the venn diagram between "people who have reasons not to run their businesses on the public clouds" and "people who are not suits but technologists and care about the user experience of setting up and maintaining their infrastructure because they want to do it themsel…

I wonder if we'll see this space you describe grow as AI startups and scaleups - or even internal departments in large enterprises - start to increase in number...

I know there's already plenty of concerns about giving cloud-based AI services access to corporate data, so maybe there's a growing market there..

Re: The Cloud Computer

#948
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cas…

I was making a bit of a joke there, sorry. It was more about the rather rare scenario of setting up a data centre in a hurry than about the long-term quality of the result.

Elmo's experiment came to mind so I tossed it in there.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it might be true that the existing vendors don't provide a good experience, I'm still a little miffed that the OP does not even mention the existence of the existing vendors.

This I don't get. It's marketing copy, from a small upstart. They don't need to link to their established competitors...

OK, then at least I'm glad someone in the comments pointed out their competitors.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#950
post #167
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.

In the spec sheet it looks like they have options with 16, 24 or 32 "compute sleds" (servers?).

Aka, a blade. Except the dimension is an odd one, 2u/2.

See pictures: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfT7MHoUoAE90QZ?format=jpg&name=...

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