So just hyperconverged infrastructure with a cute name?

“Just” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.

This achievement is clearly worth a lot to people.

With rack- and multi-rack-level management of all your hardware infrastructure (including networking and storage, along with VMs) using an API:

* https://docs.oxide.computer/api/guides/responses

Yeah including networking and storage together with virtualization is what makes hyperconverged infrastructure hyperconverged. Otherwise it's usually just called converged infrastructure.

It's nice, it's just nothing new.

oh, you tease.

So, you're saying this is just ho-hum, and you're sticking with your IBM 700 from the 1950s?

It's not a new concept, it's a new product. Ideas do not become uninteresting the moment the first person instantiates the idea. Further iterations on a possibly-good idea are also interesting.

Mainframes!

With source code availability: https://github.com/oxidecomputer

"Real" mainframes have reliability features such as hotswapping for all hardware components and automated HA/workload migration across physical racks. They can also do SSI (single system image), i.e. run a single workload across physical nodes/racks as if it was just multiple 'cores' in a single shared-memory computer. Oxide computers will probably end up doing at least some of this (namely workload migration across racks for HA) but saying that it can comprehensively replace mainframe hardware as-is is a bit of a stretch. In terms of existing hardware it's closer to a midrange computer.

The Oxide and Friends podcast had an episode on virtualizing time, specifically for the purpose of live-migrating a container from rack to rack without the VM being aware, and allowing operators to take the rack offline on their schedule. Otherwise, apparently, you end up having to leave racks running because you cannot evacuate all of the containers currently running on it. (e.g. perhaps your contracts or SLAs are such that you cannot afford even the few seconds of downtime a shut-down-here-and-spin-up-elsewhere would cause)

I believe the episode name was "Virtualizing Time"

https://pca.st/episode/c10ce39c-1348-407f-b9c2-a36ced4e6be8

way better explanation than the website copy

"no cables no assembly just cloud" wtf is that

Obviously different marketing copy speaks to different people. But that is referring to how, when you buy a rack from us, you don't need to put everything together and cable it all up: you pull it out of the box, plug in networking and power, boot the thing up, and you're good to go. Installation time is hours, not days or weeks, which is the norm.

>plug in networking and power

No cables, except for a few cables.

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. :)

powered by tesla coil

and solar panels!

Wait, these things are weather proof, too?!!

They mean no intra-rack cables, which are the overwhelming majority of cables on a typical rack.

This is pretty big, as someone who has deployed servers to datacenters before. Remote hands are very good at plugging in the network uplink and the PDUs. Doing a complete leaf-spine 25GbE network with full redundancy is something they are pretty much guaranteed to screw up at some point.

Would anyone who has actually set up a rack assume that they meant these racks were wireless with a self-contained nuclear generator?

I think their description conveys what it does just fine for the target audience.

I wouldn't be dismissive of people telling you that the product description can be improved. My opinion is that the description of the product in this thread will outperform your site 10 to 1.

I am not trying to be dismissive, I was just explaining since there was some confusion.

I'll try to explain, not in the spirit of being argumentative, but with the hope of being useful.

The comment you replied to was not questioning the value of integrated cabling. It was pointing out that the product description on the site does not make sense.

"Cloud computer" sounds like a server you rent from AWS. It's kind of like calling Rust "cloud compiler."

If you choose to use words that your audience doesn't understand, or even worse understands to mean the opposite of what you want them to mean, it's a good idea to explain these words immediately using conventional words with conventional meaning. The comments by throw0101a did that.

The product seems really cool, but there is no way I would've understood what it was from the website.

I understand that's what you're saying, and I understand what the parent is saying. I chose to explain what that alluded to, in case anyone in this conversation is also finding it hard to understand what is meant by that specific copy. That doesn't mean I don't understand the broader point, or that I think the website copy is perfect.

Perhaps if you don't understand what the copy means, then that is a sign that you are not the target audience, rather than that the copy is bad? From what I've gathered from reading other comments in this thread, that copy will make perfect sense to Oxide's target audience, as it uses words in a way that will be very familiar and make perfect sense to the kind of person who might make a purchasing decision for a system like this.

And for what it's worth, I don't think you need to explain what's happening to Steve, it seems to me that he understands perfectly well. To me you come across as being rather condescending and in my opinion Steve is being commendably polite in response.

> "Cloud computer" sounds like a server you rent from AWS. It's kind of like calling Rust "cloud compiler."

Cloud as a term is pretty undefined/overloaded. It makes sense to me if I think about 'cloud' computing as API-based provisioning on pooled resources.

Will you be selling services as well, such as taking care of installation, boot up, testing, validation, etc., for a fee?

At this stage of the company, everyone gets a white-glove installation process. I suspect that will change over time but I don't work on that part of things, so I don't personally know the details.

Thanks, are the specific details standardized and available in writing? Or is it more tailored to each customer?

Sorry to be slightly obtuse, which details are you referring to here? Help upon installation? At the moment, we are helping customers individually, yeah. But we do have a documented process we are following https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/rack-installation-... (and more on other pages there)

The details would be things such as the requirements associated with the white glove installation process:

Size of doorways, weight bearing capacity of floors, electrical service parameters, environmental conditions, etc.

e.g. Does it actually handle electrical voltage fluctuations of +/- 1V, or whatever is advertised?

The guaranteed parameters of a fully set up machine:

Minimum performance metrics, software compatibility with whatever the sales department promised, maximum power draw, etc.

e.g. Can it reliably hit X metric (FLOPS, IOPS, Integer calculations, etc.)?

And so on.

Ah yeah, so the "facilities" section of https://oxide.computer/product/specifications has some of these things, probably the closest we have to publicly publishing that in a general sense.

Yes I understand, but will your included service actually verify that everything is set up correctly, meets advertised parameters, and sign off on it? (Such that the customer can start using it immediately afterwards.)

Or does the customer need to take on some risk and hazard associated with installation, configuration, initial boot up, etc.?

e.g. If someone buys with the intention of using it up to X FLOPS, and the machine only delivers Y FLOPS once it's all said and done, what happens?

It’s not the area of the company I personally work on, so I don’t know those details, to be honest. We certainly make sure that everything is working properly.

So I assume there's no guarantee that it will be plug and play after the white glove installation?

Otherwise I would imagine it would be a major selling point and be advertised publicly.

I mean, we absolutely sell support. I just don't know anything about the details personally. You shouldn't take my lack of knowledge as a "no," just a "steve doesn't personally know."

I had assumed a simple 'yes'/'no'/'maybe sometime later' answer was just a quick phone call away with the relevant person.

But if it is a complicated enough internal issue for that not to be the case, then my apologies for pestering.

the world if website explainers were allowed 9 words instead of 6 .jpg

> hyperconverged cloud infrastructure

> no cables no assembly just cloud

"no cables no assembly just cloud" is completely misleading to any kind of people - tech or marketing or not.

When people hear cloud, it means that aspects such as electricity costs, electricity stability, Internet, bandwidth, fire protection, safety, etc etc are abstracted away.

Oxide IS on-premise, right? The website is very vague and wishy-washy.

It is on premise. You interact with the rack the same way you interact with the public cloud: as a pool of resources. The specifics are abstracted away. “Private cloud” is pretty well established terminology in this space, and that’s what we’re doing.

Hypothesis: "no cables" and "no assembly" here is analogous to the term "serverless". Or, more abstractly, the word "literally".

Available to buy turnkey, not just rented out.

There is no just in hyper

> start spinning up VMs

What a waste of resources.

When you start a container in AWS, do you think Amazon is letting you run that without a VM? VMs are pretty lightweight these days.

With hypervisor support it really isn't

What this guy said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38024122

If you have a rack like that you'd probably want it to run a real database or server backend.

Have they basically done for the data centre what iMac did for computers in about year 1999 (or whenever!)

> what iMac did for computers in about year 1999

Ehrm. What is that exactly?

Are you alluding to cute design, different user interface? Or ditching then common PC component modularity? "Thinking differently"?

One difference is that Oxide development was done in the open and they don't seem hell bent on creating a closed ecosystem. (Yet, at least)

I think Oxide shares one idea with Apple: hardware and software should be created for each other. In that sense, your parent is correct.

You are also correct that we diverge from Apple in other ways, such as our commitment to openness, rather than secrecy.

Yes. I imagine I got downvoted because it sounds like a snark but it wasn’t meant to be.

> Ehrm. What is that exactly?

The first iMac famously made it easy to connect to the Internet; The 'i' in iMac was for "Internet". Its setup manual was a couple of pages long, mostly pictures and IIRC, just 37 words.

Brutal downvotes. I guess people forget the old Jeff Goldblum commercials? "There is no step 3."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX4PzvWgu6c

It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container. Cooling, power supply, compute, storage, and network, all in a box. You supply power, a big network pipe, and the piping to external heat exchangers.

I know one company who offers that (there might be more): https://www.grando.ai/en/container

AWS does that already for the defense industry: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-aws-mod...

> It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container.

Sun did that experiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Modular_Datacenter

Yeah, I'm aware, but I didn't think they were serious about it.

That's entirely fair: Sun wasn't serious about most of the products they rolled out... and customers noticed.

There are quite a few companies selling “modular data centers” now.

See §Examples:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_data_center

Also:

* https://www.deltapowersolutions.com/en/mcis/data-center-solu...

* https://atos.net/en/solutions/high-performance-computing-hpc...

* https://www.zelladc.com/zella-max

Search for "shipping container data centre" or "containerized datacenter".

Huawei also does this. Built to order, single container. Completely isolated, plug’n’play.

There are whitebox Windows laptops, OpenWRT routers, Arduino boards, ArduPilot drones, etc. It almost sounds strange that there are no prepopulated 12U racks intended for OpenStack(is that still a thing?)

IIJ has a project like this, data center in a container, just add power. They build it all up in Japan, ship it to rural areas across the world to basically jumpstart a local data center (I imagine mostly for industrial sites). They had a fun project where they had a half rack, powered by solar and connected to the net via Starlink.

No idea how they do things today, but v0.1 of Azure (before it was called Azure) was a bunch of containers in a field. I remember seeing an aerial photo at the time.