Oxide reimagines private cloud as a 3k-pound blade server
theregister.com
theregister.com
The issue isn't desire, it's more of focus and design difficulty. The design of the product starts from "what if you're building servers by the rack," and so a lot of choices make sense in that context, but not necessarily others. So building something smaller means effectively building a different product. And of course, many companies have multiple product lines, but they're also much more mature than we are: we've only shipped two racks so far (more to come soon!). And that's where the "focus" comes in: we need to build a sustainable company first, and then expand second. I can't speak to where the future goes, and if we will eventually go in that direction, or on what timescale, but what I can say is that we hear you on our side.
>The design of the product starts from "what if you're building servers by the rack,"
As you surely know, there are a lot of racks that are smaller than 42/48U ;). I'm not at all opposed to your "build by the rack" approach, I'm just hoping eventually there might be options from you that are 12U or 18U racks, or 42U racks where 6/12/18/24/36U/whatever are your stuff and then there is a bit of extra space for a handful of customer misc racked options that don't fit into your buckets (a couple of racked Macs for example which surprisingly yes can still be a thing).
Anyway, absolutely you'd have to make it that far, absolutely don't want to see you succumb to the classic startup issue of over expansion ahead of scale efficiencies and running out of runway. But what you're doing is exciting, and I guess I just hope to see the benefits get more decentralized someday is all. Right now I have a hodgepodge of OPNsense/Omada/UniFi/TrueNAS/Proxmox(formerly VMware but now that's down the toilet)/etc deployed with various clients and for myself in rural new england, works well overall including when the WAN drops as is fairly regular, but it'd be real helpful to have more refined options someday! So wishing Oxide the best of luck.
As an aside, if you haven’t already, I’d recommend the Oxide and friends podcast.
This is what makes me sad.
I've exchanged messages a bit with Oxide. I wanted to write about them. But they are many timezones from me, so live talk is very hard to schedule.
I couldn't find enough info in text form to research a story. I am a speedreader. I can happily cruise along at 1000 words a minute and can burst up to 3000wpm for short periods. (I read whole novels this way in childhood: a 1970s novel of 200pp was 25min to half an hour.)
It's how I do my job as a writer: lots and lots of reading. Tens of thousands of words a day.
I can't do this with speech. I can't follow speech at 2x speed, and that's still less than half my normal reading speed. 1.5 to 1.75x is the maximum. I'd need a week to listen to the research material for every short article I write.
No text discussion == no coverage.
I am delighted that my colleague was able to do this story, but he's on the same continent as Oxide.
I can't bear talk radio, it's so slow. I've never listened to a podcast in my life; the mere idea horrifies me. You want me to squander an hour on some unscripted chatter about something I could read in 5-10 minutes? Dear gods, no! :-(
Hmm, so more like a mainframe?
They have made a lot of fuss about the "hardware root of trust", but that seems more like a fetish of the founders than something regular customers are asking for.
Personally I am more interested in the software stack - a much simpler Openstack alternative is very welcome, as long as I can use my own hardware.
The whole company does, to me. But that may be due to their publications being so engineering focused.
If I am gone invest many millions into infrastructure, you better expect that I expect some basic safety features.
Of all the things, they have actually not talked about the hardware root of trust itself that much. There is no full podcast on only the root of trust. Compared to things like boot fireware, VM migration, network design and so on and so on.
What they have talked more about is system firmware in general, including their embedded OS. Partly why the chip they used for root-of-trust came up is because they found multiple bugs in that chip. Turns out secure silicon is really hard, and if you don't have secure silicon you don't have a great hardware root-of-trust.
Pretty much everything with Oxide is, generally do what the industry has done before and uses, they just want to do it better and more open. And root-of-trust is one example of that.
I actually wish they would talk about it more, as they have not shared much. I think they have mentioned it will be part of some podcast episode sometimes.
A few different podcast episodes about the product:
Storage: Oxide and Friends 2/12/2024 -- Crucible: Oxide Storage
OS: Oxide and Friends 1/29/2024 -- Helios
Virtualization: Oxide and Friends 6/12/2023 -- Virtualizing Time
Networking: Oxide and Friends 2/27/2023 -- Rack-scale Networking
Boot: Twitter Space 10/10/2022 -- Holistic Boot
Firmware: Twitter Space 12/13/2021 -- The Pragmatism of Hubris
Switch: Twitter Space 11/29/2021 -- The Sidecar Switch
As mentioned, there is no podcast about the design Hardware Root of Trust yet.
You are saying it is both table stakes and no one wants it. Ok. Wonder what the 3rd comment will say
And yet it has been and continues to be one of the hardest problems in IT.
Wouldn't they be vulnerable, BTW, to an OCP integrator offering the same functionality with plug-compatible parts?
Buying a bunch of Dell boxes, some vendor network gear and a paying for WMWare is what they want to make easier.
There's such a small market of folks openly selling OCP accepted or inspired (OCP's terminology) systems. You definitely are gonna need to get quotes.
OCP does a ton of super great things, but alas it seems like actually making reference designs for computers has somewhat fallen to the wayside. I could be totally missing the goods here, but I see a bunch of very abstract system configuration specifications in https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/Working . Please, would love to be wrong here, but: I don't see actual plans for building systems. Just very abstract
OCP just doesn't seem like it means all that much. Sure sometimes they have good specs that one can ask for. But in terms of actually building systems it still seems like a free for all, that OCP offers little guidance.
Sure, but a pre-assembled rack of OCP inspired (and compatible) hardware combined with the right software would be a significant competitor, with the advantage that parts of different specs (and still compatible) could be sourced from various suppliers allowing the system to be continuously expanded and/or updated.
What they seem to offer is mainframe-like throughput with generic software (mainframes also run Linux, and do that really well) and proprietary hardware made from generic parts.
If OCP stuff with some extra software could have easily enabled this kind of product, then the company wouldn't have to exist in the first place.
> sourced from various suppliers
They deliberately adopted a single supplier strategy. Again this is exactly what they did not want. See their 'Common Wisdom' podcast.
Multiple suppliers have advantages, but also disadvantages.
> What they seem to offer is mainframe-like throughput with generic software
The software isn't generic at all, its very costume but unlike with a mainframe open all the way down.
And a mainframe is just a very different architecture, the architecture isn't really like a mainframe at all.
> and proprietary hardware made from generic parts
Its their own costume board design both for the server and switch, a very different architecture overall.
It depends what you mean by generic parts. Sure like everybody else they didn't design every single part themselves.
But how the parts are combined and enabled with software is the unique selling point.
P.S. renting physical servers or hosting in your own colo is also still viable, especially with amazing second-hand rack server prices. The cloud isn't the only option.
10% is small enough that it does not matter for these types of informal conversational scenarios, and in cases where it does, do a proper conversion.
/2 = 1500 .1 = 150 = 1500 - 150 = 1350kg
Google's result: 1360.777kg
An average 1 km3 cloud has 500000 kg of water droplets.
The Sun is another interesting (size * density) example. The Sun's "power per unit volume" is only about the same as a compost pile. But because it's so large, this is enough to keep it glowing brightly.
See "Power Shelf Spec":
* https://oxide.computer/product/specifications
Plug is either CS8365C or L22-20P. 15 kW is fairly typical for a 'generic' data centre rack.
For something like HPC, many systems are getting into water cooling nowadays: either air-cooled servers with a rear-door radiator (60kW), or with water-cooling right to the servers.
> Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
The APU, which we explored at length back in December, combines 24 Zen 4 cores, six CDNA 3 cores, and 128GB of HBM3 memory into a single socket. "To me the APU is the mainstreaming of this accelerated computer where we're no longer having to have these like islands of acceleration," Cantrill said."
Ok, but does it provide the performance customers want?
Cloud providers use logical abstractions to draw a line around the "system"...beyond the crush HN has on Oxide, it isn't clear to me how their product is a gain. Who is their customer? Someone with needs bigger than one server but smaller than one rack?
No, somebody that needs at least a 1/2 rack or maybe 10-100 of them. But maybe not enough to design a costume datacenter.
Why would they target costumers, that want less then 1 rack? That defeats the whole point of building a rack computer in the first place.
Some will see this as a strong argument for workers' rights, some will see it as a strong argument for robotic workers. Some will ignore the issues with the servers' physical characteristics because they don't have experience working in server rooms.
The meta-point then would seem to be that material conditions dictate the unfolding of reality. It is the offering of opportunities and the economic conditions by which they become available that determines the destiny of every agent participating in said economy.
Have they shipped this thing, or is that just a render? No cables are attached, so it's not in operation. It's certainly possible to make this work, but they have to get serious about floors, ramps, access, and structural support.
[1] https://www.phswest.com/product/4000sxhd-motorized-server-ra...
Video of the back is about halfway through.
You might enjoy https://www.phswest.com/product/4000sxhd-motorized-server-ra...
You can find a picture of them packaging it on twitter somewhere.