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- Hacker News
- It's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.by dralley
- They didn't. They actually said they have huge demand because of AI companies. Turns out, when the AI is surfing the web or using doing other task, that's a CPU. So they also have demand for CPU.by panick21_
- I'm sure you're aware there's a huge amount of computation that isn't matrix multiplication :)by sunshowers
- Curious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at least allows for replacing the card if it breaks/wears/etc, and mounting the front of the adapter card to a bulkhead should prevent much shifting of the card in the slot. Neat design and reuse of a cheap high speed connector.by bradfa
- The screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.by PoignardAzur
- completely locked my machine up with Firefox on Linux. Gave up after that.by onefiftymike
- That's why I prefer BSD :Pby ykurtov
- Any console errors? Perhaps drop an issue on the repo if you have a moment: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues
- How easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and without tools?by bradfa
- The sleds blind mate to power and network on the backplane so removing the sled will disconnect it. Once the sled is disconnected you pull the fan assembly out and replace it.by sudomateo
- Cool tour. I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?by girfan
- Hard to compete there when most of the margin is going to NVIDIA, pretty much impossible if you don't have the scale of Dell/Supermicro/etcby connicpu
- Oh wow, they're on the Epyc 9005 series now. Very cool. Dude, what a monster of a machine that rack is haha. Bloody hell.by arjie
- I simply don’t see the value here. At the cost of these systems its inevitable that you hire at least one person full time to manage your rack infra, and that person would likely prefer the customizability of commodity hardware.
Source: I run a startup that recently did our datacenter buildout. At no point were we at all interested in a single integrated vendor.
by aabhay - You don't need oxide, you can't afford it, and you're not a target customer.by ykurtov
- All we can say is empirically this is not true. Plenty of people whose full time job is managing rack infra are sick and tired of the customizability of commodity hardware, of the many custom bugs in commodity software, and of the customizability of the price of VMware.by dcre
- Wouldn't that person want to have everything work well together so he has less headaches?by subarctic
- I met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.
- Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1]by bcantrill
- Oxide hitting stride just in time for the memory crisis. I hope they can sustain because they have the coolest stuff, and the podcast is great.
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
by piker - Source code here :)by dcre
- Thanks for sharing that. Very cool - was this sales product that you decided to release or has it always been public?by piker
- This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight. Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
by andrewl-hn - Blade servers have been doing this for 25+ years.by foobiekr
- > Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
by fred_is_fred - I learned about blade servers back in ~2010 because Blizzard used to run World of Warcraft realms on them and auctioned them off for charity.
- Meanwhile a Hetzner rack: https://i.redd.it/u3o410rwdt6h1.jpegby whazor
- > Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this,
Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
by baby_souffle - I wish I could edit my post.
Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the shelf units for networking, storage, etc. Yes, you could mix and match different components based on your needs, but that also meant that there were extra wires, cables, mounting rails, and more importantly - all these different components ran a mix of software that had to integrate using common denominator protocols and speeds.
Steve rightly mentioned the integration below, and I didn't put it in my message because I kinda assumed that we include software in this discussion too.
HP in 2005 had an army of programmers writing all sorts of firmware and software and another army of hardware engineers, too. They could have made an Oxide computer back then, and it would sell really well. But they didn't, and none of their competitors did despite this being an obvious product (in hindsight), an THIS is what I find interesting.
by andrewl-hn - The big difference that everyone is missing in this subthread is that Oxide is about the hardware and the software.
There are systems which have similar overall hardware designs, but they are usually integrating a large amount of hardware and software from multiple vendors. Oxide is much closer to "everything is produced by Oxide."
I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
by steveklabnik