16 ms·
Our $100M Series B
- wetwater 1y agoIf only they bring back their "On the metal" podcast. That podcast scratched an itch I didnt knew I had .
- bcantrill 1y agoCheck out Oxide and Friends[0]! We've been doing it for several years now, and it's a much more flexible format that allows the team to be heard in its own voice -- and allows us to weigh in on whatever's on our collective mind. [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/ https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
- kortilla 1y agoOxide is a fully closed ecosystem. The product seems cool but it sucks from an open computing perspective. The “iPhone” of the data center.
- steveklabnik 1y agoWhat would you like to see open that isn't? The major thing I can think of is not opening up like, our CAD files for the hardware. But that's pretty far away from your characterization.
- wmf 1y agoIt's open source (that effectively requires the rack as a dongle) but not flexible or modular in any way. There's not even a single PCIe slot AFAIK.
- steveklabnik 1y agoI see. I wouldn't describe that as "fully closed" but I appreciate the perspective!
- esafak 1y agoI see no mention of GPUs in their platform?
- cpach 1y agoEarlier answer from Oxide employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182660
- yencabulator 1y agoMy personal predictions: #1: Don't expect to see it until after AMD or someone else makes a product that actually manages to compete against Nvidia. Nvidia is pretty hostile to not running their low-level software stack, and Oxide is all about the legacy of Solaris. #2: AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package. #3: AMD MI400 and such AI accelerators will be primarily sold as full racks with its own custom "networking" (UALink switch), and the actual host CPU on those devices will be lower specs and mostly relegated to setup and metrics of the AI work, much like storage and networking appliances are built, AI workload will not even pass through the host CPU. I'm not sure Oxide can compete in that world. The "business logic CPUs" will reside in a different rack.
- zozbot234 1y ago> AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package. Isn't this just an iGPU? They generally have much lower performance than GPU's sitting on a dedicated card.
- yencabulator 1y agoIt's built to be deployed in units of racks, so that "i" is a little funny. It's not a little wart on the side of a general-purpose CPU. 432 GB memory at 19.6 TB/s are the claimed specs. For one package. Now fill a rack with 72 of those. (If only AMD could execute on the software side...)
- toomuchtodo 1y agoBig congrats to the Oxide team.
- kamranjon 1y agoAnyone here using oxide hardware? I remember reading their blog post when they were spinning up and it seems like they have actual products now.
- flobosg 1y agoThey have for a while already, see https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891).
- nahimn 1y agoRooting for this team -- just wish i could afford one of these racks... =)
- dijit 1y agoSame. I think it brings an interesting point actually. "Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need, but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes. ((controversial take warning)) Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86 boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of cheap x86 hardware meant that the lions share of development happened on them. People could throw a pentium 2 PC in a corner and have it serving web traffic, and when things started growing too much you could add more P2 machines or even grab a Xeon 4socket machine later down the line. This isn't possible with mainframes, and thus, people largely don't mess with them. The annoying thing is that this kind of problem has some kind of stickiness effect. If you need a server, and then another, you buy them as you need them and if you're already 20 pizza boxes in; it's a pretty big ask to rip them all out and moving to a different vendor entirely than staging replacements one after another. So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors? I don't think I've worked for any of those. (FD: I'm actually a fan of the Oxide team, and the concept, and I would buy into the ecosystem except I have needs that are at most 3 servers at a time)
- supriyo-biswas 1y ago> So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors? Companies do modernization/migration projects from time to time; I guess one way to solve the audience issue is to find companies that have such a planned event and try to market a “better” alternative. While I’m also a fan of Oxide; my primary concern is whether they can actually get companies to ignore the marketing that comes out of cloud services.
- ipdashc 1y agoA great point regarding mainframes, but isn't it somewhat irrelevant given that Oxide's computer is x86 and mainly (...only?) intended as a VM host? And I assume most people are running things in VMs nowadays, so you can "just" migrate over images to the new system (I know it's not that simple, but it's also not quite as complicated as, I imagine, porting something from a bunch of bare-metal x86 boxen to a mainframe). Also, I'm given the impression that Oxide prioritizes user experience - their website shows off a clean UI and they presumably have modern, easy-to-use APIs. Mainframes, in contrast, seem like a whole different world - if I convinced my company to move to a mainframe, who would even operate it? I know modern mainframes are closer to "normal" servers than their old reputation, but still, I'd imagine it's pretty esoteric stuff, and IBM is famous for not being the cheapest to work with. I do find it pretty funny that their business model seems to be reinventing mainframes, but I feel like there are important distinctions too. Hopefully they do well (I'd also love to have access to this stuff, but yeah, same "needs that are at most 3 servers" deal).
- sneak 1y agoAlways refreshing to see people who actually believe in software freedoms (and not just doing open source cosplay like many big corporations) forge a pathway to big success. There are many things that suggest free software and the movement for software freedoms might be on its way to a historical footnote. This is absolutely not one of them. Hey Bryan, one day when you’re very successful market-wise (you and your team have already obviously been massively successful from an engineering standpoint) and aren’t in crash-priority-override mode to get cash flow, please consider a project to build SME stuff that reaps the security and integration benefits of your big enterprise stuff that is affordable for end users like entrepreneurs and home hobbyists, like Ubiqiti does. I’d love a lil’ $5-10k homelab unit, and I bet a number of smaller universities and organizations would go for stuff in the low 5 figure 2-3kW range. Obviously your bread and butter comes from companies that size their orders by number of racks, but if you never go downmarket then thousands of us hackers that love what you’re doing will never get to touch Oxide stuff except at a job in a megacorp.
- immibis 1y agoThe term "open source" was created by corporations in opposition to "free software", as a watered-down version of the latter. Open source itself is already free software cosplay.
- cestith 1y agoIt would be a good onramp into their ecosystem. Compare this to the deep educational discounts and the school-targeted platforms from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and such.
- kensai 1y agoAll the best! I personally came to know Oxide for their cool RFD culture. It's worth a read: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/ https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/ Start from RFD 1 ;)
- cosmic_quanta 1y agoI love the idea. RFD 1 mentions taking inspiration from Golang and Rust proposal processes. The Haskell Foundation also uses the same proposal process, and I love it. I'm a big proponent of the "writing is thinking" mantra. Unfortunately, in my experience, not all technical leaders value grassroots proposal processes like the Oxide RFDs
- bcantrill 1y agoJust because it's hopelessly on-brand for us to offer up a podcast episode for everything, you may also be interested in our Oxide and Friends episode on RFDs with our colleagues Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-backbone-of-oxide https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...
- ghaff 1y agoI need to dive back in. Lots of distractions recently.
- KetoMojito 1y agoBryan you absolute legend. You give the best technical seminars i've ever watched (& countlessly rewatched). Ty for inspiring a generation of engineers. Best of luck with everything at Oxide!
- chrishare 1y agoWhat was it?
- bflesch 1y agothe rfd interface looks really nice. I couldn't find the github repo for it, is it proprietary? Edit: some popup on their page links to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd but it's a 404 Edit2: it's at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site
- jppope 1y agoLove what they are putting out in the world! Congrats on the round, and being able to proliferate the work!
- setheron 1y agoIsn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ? A bit humorous from that perspective given Cantrills dislike for Larry Nevertheless cool company and product.
- immibis 1y agoCompeting with someone you don't like who has a monopoly on something makes a lot of sense.
- atonse 1y agoIsn’t the main issue with Oracle the aggressive sales and exploitation of captive customers?
- calvinmorrison 1y agoI'd assume oracles main issue is that personal-computers-on-steroids as servers mostly won, and we don't all need AS/400 or mainframe architectures. 99% of problems can be solved with practically commodity hardware and software.
- Sparkle-san 1y agoThey don't call oracle "a law firm with a software division" for no reason.
- cpach 1y agoTo me they are much more similar to Sun than Oracle (before the latter aquired the former).
- throw0101c 1y ago> Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ? Oxide is kind of like Sun Microsystems, building polished vertically integrated monster machines, e.g. Sun E10k. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise
- panick21_ 1y ago
- MOARDONGZPLZ 1y agoVery bullish on this team! Congrats. I’ve been pushing my company to adopt their hardware, and we have!
- htrp 1y agoSame! also curious about how you think about the potential of vendor lock-in?
- steveklabnik 1y ago(Not your parent) What kind of lock in are you worried about?
- cosmic_quanta 1y agoHow do you like using their stuff? I would be interested in reading an experience report
- oldpersonintx2 1y agogreat people and vision, but the hardware market went apoplectic for GPUs at scale just as they were pushing a better way to manage VMs in the midst of everyone making a land grab for GB200s, does anyone have time to evaluate their alternative OS?
- mrcwinn 1y agoEveryone at Oxide makes the same salary: >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-values https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...] Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
- actionfromafar 1y agoThat would be even more outlandish, I don't think that's possible.
- kylebenzle 1y ago[flagged]
- draw_down 1y ago[dead]
- lumost 1y agoIt depends, there are certainly founders who come from sufficient money that the value of founding a unicorn is not material to their Net worth. However I’d also suggest that the concentration of tech in the last decade is also partly due to startups chronically stiffing their employees on equity. The difference in compensation potential naturally forces a talent split where talent joins larger and much better compensated firms.
- illegalmemory 1y agoThey have since updated it slightly > Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component.
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- pjmlp 1y agoCongratulations on the achievement. It is always a pleasure to follow up with Oxide on their podcast, their technological decision to keep the Solaris linage alive, all the places across the infrastructure they have been using Go and Rust as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ryao 1y agoCongratulations everyone at Oxide!
- siliconc0w 1y agoPretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their own compute knows the pain they're solving. Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they realize how thick the margins have become or want better guarantees over sovereignty.
- master_crab 1y agoI don’t disagree that there are some fat margins in the cloud, but how is vendor lock-in any different here? Companies could end up paying fat margins to oxide too while still managing physical gear and plant.
- TZubiri 1y agoWell, their servers are mostly hypervisors, so the interface is mostly any virtual machine. You can "just" migrate by exporting or importing the vms.
- yencabulator 1y agoYou're literally ignoring that the Oxide management stack is very much custom and effectively vendor-locking the purchase to be maintained by them. They are not general purpose PC servers. You can "just" migrate away from Oxide but that would mean throwing away the hardware you now own. That's the grandparent's point; if you're migrating out of a cloud to avoid the margins demanded by the cloud vendor, now you're at the mercy of whatever Oxide thinks your support contract is worth. Sure, the convenience may be worth it, but watch how many companies are now struggling to get off of VMWare after Broadcom moves.
- TZubiri 1y agoThis reminds me of people complaining about github being closed source and moving to gitlab, or people obsessing over terraform to avoid cloud locking. Sure you will have vendor locking at the periferies, but the core is what's important, the guest vms. The hypervisor is whatever. If you have 100 vms running on ec2, you have done a great job of designing portable software, don't obsess over the last 1%.
- Rafuino 1y agoGreat news for Oxide. I followed their podcasts for a while but they petered out and I haven't heard much about their products/growth for a while. Sounds like it's still viable. USIT... what a cryptic website! Is it government-related (like In-Q-Tel) or private? Have no idea...
- neilv 1y agohttps://oodaloop.com/analysis/archive/thomas-tull-chairs-the-5-billion-us-innovative-technology-fund-shield-ai-among-early-investments/ https://oodaloop.com/analysis/archive/thomas-tull-chairs-the...
- colesantiago 1y agoLots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here? $100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M? Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?
- cpach 1y agoAFAIK staying private is nearly impossible after taking VC funding…? Also, what they do is very capital-intensive, so I’m not surprised that they’re raising more money.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoI don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very good team though.
- cpach 1y agoThese days there are very few companies innovating in this space. Oxide is the only one I can think of. (No, HPE and Dell doesn’t count, not in my book at least.) There used to be lots of them, but they all had a very rough time after the 90s when cheap x86 boxes started to become ubiquitous. I have no idea if Oxide will succeed or not, but I sure hope so. If it goes well they might become the Sun of the 20s.
- dvtkrlbs 1y agoThey created a lot of hardware and low level work. (The bullet point on the blog post)
- mkeeter 1y agoThe server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs from the usual vendors. The "secret sauce management layer" is available at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the MPLv2 license. (I work at Oxide)
- kayson 1y agoWhat do they need so much capital for?
- dcminter 1y agoI think the downvoting on you is a little harsh. TFA does allude to it, but doesn't explicitly answer your question. I presume the implicit answer is here: > With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together? i.e. they need the capital in order to be able to satisfy large orders on sane timeframes - but that's very expensive when you're a hardware business.
- kayson 1y agoThanks. It was a genuine question but I guess I can see how it might be taken otherwise.
- simonw 1y agoMy guess is scaling up their ability to manufacture hardware.
- devmor 1y agoThey are a hardware company. Hardware costs a lot of money to innovate and build on.
- tosh 1y agoKudos & godspeed! (random superficial comment: the ascii art + high fidelity ui combination on the oxide landing page is chef's kiss)
- raphman 1y agoGergely Orosz' newsletter contained some background on Oxide in 2024: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/oxide https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/oxide
- dcminter 1y agoOxide, at least for an outsider, looks like a company that channels some of the spirit of early Sun Microsystems (I'm aware of the connections of course). I'm quite envious of those who work there - I hope the demands of big money don't crush any of that spirit. Sadly when I look at their jobs posted I don't see much that would line up with my skillset, but I keep an eye on them just on the offchance.
- Quarrel 1y agoRight? And such a clear value statement. If I could, I'd invest. Sure, they might fail, but they're shooting their shot, and to me it has a clear differentiator that would improve the market for most of their users (if not the incumbents).
- criddell 1y agoI wish there was a way for small investors ($25-50k) to get in. AFAIK, the only thing we can do is wait for an IPO and hope we can get in at a reasonable price.
- EcommerceFlow 1y agoIsn't it sad we're not able to invest into most new tech companies these days, with private equity taking the lead. I don't blame the companies after seeing what going public entails, but still unfortunate.
- maerF0x0 1y agosome aspect of that picture are nanny-state sorts of laws like Accreditation which have a bias that says if you're "poor" then you're not intelligent enough or qualified enough to make your own best choices of investment. I was happy to learn about Sweater Ventures https://www.sweaterventures.com/our-story https://www.sweaterventures.com/our-story (and their kind) which are opening up access to investments, and also helping ensure the entry price is quite low (for example I invest $50 a month with them) . It is my hope that in the future you will be able to order a micro fraction of any company as easily as you could a starbucks. And IMO part of that equation might be to have the state start to work against contracts which restrict your rights on your own property (essentially contracts restrict when you can sell your shares, usually not until IPO or a company organized liquidity event)
- Aurornis 1y agoThere are actually a lot of ways to invest in smaller startups now, but the catch is that the best startups don’t want your money. Even if all of the laws lined up just right, it’s unlikely that a company like Oxide would be interested in collecting a lot of little investors and then maintaining all of the obligations that go along with serving those investors.
- digitaltrees 1y agoYes. This is a real problem. It started as a result of the Enron collapse. The government over corrected in an effort to keep the public safe from fraud. On the flip side many people with pensions are invested in private markets through their pension funds.
- drdrek 1y agoGod why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT... Cool 1999 aesthetics though
- devmor 1y agoIf you scroll past the marketing blurb, I think the rest of the main page explains in pretty clear and simple terms what their product is. What did you find confusing about it?
- mlnj 1y agoReading the first 20 lines of text that they have broken down in to: Company Name Single line Headline Problem Our Solution Gives you the entire company premise and product description.
- qualeed 1y agoThey explain what they do pretty much immediately on the home page, I'm not too sure where the confusion comes from.
- diggan 1y agoMaybe I'm old-school, but I clicked on the logo in the top left, then read the first sentence which reads "On-demand elastic resources", which gives me some idea about what it is, and then later it says "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data center." which makes me 100% understand what the product is. Do new internet users not know that the landing page usually contains information about the product they're talking about in their blog posts? 99% of the cases you can find what you're looking for on the landing page, and it took me a whole of 30 seconds to get here, writing this comment took longer time.
- sofixa 1y ago> On-demand elastic resources Which is kind of wrong, because there is nothing elastic nor "on demand" about metal you buy.
- throw0101c 1y agoMeta: Oxide has talked about the designs of their cooling [1][2][3], so I'm curious to know if they ever start offering GPUs how they'd handle that. Folks seem to be moving toward liquid cooling[4] either to the rack/chassis[5] or even to the chip[6]. [1] https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power-consumption-in-half https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVXClXVuzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVXClXVuzE [3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hTJYY_Y1H9Q https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hTJYY_Y1H9Q [4] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-efficiency-liquid-cooling-data-centers-ai-factories/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic... [5] https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/top-10-liquid-cooling-companies https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/top-10-liquid-co... [6] https://zutacore.com https://zutacore.com
- jvanderbot 1y agoOxide's blogs talk about cooling _a lot_, apparently their stack runs very cool b/c they've reorganized the whole thing around efficiency, and written all the firmware to support that goal.
- vonneumannstan 1y agoSkeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that
- capital_guy 1y agoI believe the fans are actually smaller. The rack is definitely quieter than other racks, but he says in the rear rack tour that it's quite hot. Check out these videos of it [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4
- steveklabnik 1y ago
- jvanderbot 1y agoThere is something so calming and pleasant about a well-structured thesis statement: > Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!) strategically important for many; that the entire stack — hardware and software — needed to be rethought from first principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off. Very clear and logical, stating from their first principle world view what the result could be if they succeed.
- chubot 1y agoI would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"? I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project https://github.com/opencomputeproject https://github.com/opencomputeproject Google definitely rebuilt the stack from first principles -- the data center was basically a huge embedded system, from power to racks to CPUs/memory/disk/network to kernel to user space to cluster software. (And no, they did not use Kubernetes.) I have no idea how active the OpenCompute project is -- is Facebook still the main contributor, and are they still releasing their new rack designs? And I also wonder how much Oxide has diverged from it? At least on the hardware side. On the software side, I guess the Illumos-derived parts and Rust parts are completely different. Well, when they say they did their own: - board designs - microcontroller OS - platform enablement software - host hypervisor - switch - integrated storage service - control plane Then yeah it seems like maybe only board designs and the switch COULD have either come from or been influenced by OpenCompute, but maybe those didn't either. (I have no idea tbh) Maybe they only got the mechanical and power stuff from OpenCompute? i.e. the parts that change more slowly
- steveklabnik 1y agoWe initially talked about OpenCompute, yeah, but as far as I know we ended up moving away from that years ago.
- neom 1y agoI'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I could tell the answers were "yes" and "don't care" - I had thought this wasn't a great answer but it seems I'm wrong. I was chatting with Boris Mann just last week about them and he said "actually John that isn't correct, think of how much quick compute needs to come online and how much discreet compute is going to be required with low management overhead, they're doing just fine and that market will grow" - After that I did some research and pondered on it for a day - I think my friend is right and I am wrong, I think at this point Oxide is going to be a really strong name and I wish them the best of luck.
- sethops1 1y agoI was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?
- 9dev 1y agoIf it translates to improved efficiency, sure. And this big of a round seems to indicate that idea has some merit
- transpute 1y agoWhat percentage of enterprise IT compute has not moved to a public cloud?
- dmoy 1y agoI'm not sure anyone really knows uptime institute publishes some good numbers from survey, which puts on prem + colo still at >50% last I checked. And still some additional 5% in like... on prem in closets. Last year Amazon said it was 85% on prem. I dunno who has the right numbers.
- skeptrune 1y agoHuge congrats to everyone at oxide! I could not be happier to see such a cool company trying to create a real alternative to renting from the hyperscalers.
- bix6 1y agoWhat is the initial cost to setup their smallest system on prem?
- diggan 1y agoNot finding a ton of information about it, was curious about it too. But the "smallest system" seems huge, like 16 sleds and a HN comment from 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840) says: > An oxide rack has a minimum cost of something like 600k not including all the infra you need to run a rack, maintenance, and then needing to upgrade So maybe not super useful for people who are looking to do some home-lab stuff or even setups for SMBs. Edit: Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552556 > My guess is that a base config would be somewhere between $400K to $500K but could very definitely go up from there for a completely "loaded" config.
- bix6 1y agoWow so really for F500 and such
- sailfast 1y agoGovernment.
- steveklabnik 1y agoIt's much broader than that, but you're right that we make sense for larger organizations, not smaller ones.
- klooney 1y agoAny plans to launch a desk sized version built from Raspberry Pis?
- steveklabnik 1y ago
- lostmsu 1y agoAmazing, considering they don't seem to have GPU offerings.
- cpach 1y agoThere are very many workloads that do not benefit from a GPU.
- mystraline 1y agoI applied here. Basically anti-llm long form one-sided interview writeup. Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was sent. No reasons, either. I probably should have just used an LLM to generate good sounding garbage. Probably the same chance to get even a stage 1 interview.
- steveklabnik 1y agoWe do take a long time due to needing to read all of those applications, but three months is longer than we'd like, so I apologize about that. We don't do "stage 1 interviews", we only do interviews as the very final step in the process, when we've narrowed things down to a handful of people. That initial packet is like 85% of the process.
- kierangill 1y agoI applied in early 2021. Getting rejected from any company carries a sting, but I was grateful to have gone through the process. I didn’t realize at the time, but Oxide’s application process was the best form of interview prep I’ve done. The process forced me to thoroughly document my values and career accomplishments. In later non-Oxide interviews, I effectively recited what I had written my materials. In that way, it has felt less one-sided than every other company application process I’ve gone through. I was able to take away an artifact from the experience, versus being filtered out via a coding challenge. It’s also been rewarding to reflect on my submission from years ago to see how my mindset and skills have evolved. If you have any interest in working in the pediatric telemedicine space, I encourage you to email me your application. We accept Oxide materials. I’m happy to provide feedback as a hiring manager. My email and our company website are in my bio.
- sudomateo 1y agoLoved reading your experience here. Thank you for posting it. I've written about the value of an artifact in the past when people pushed back against the Oxide materials saying they are a lot of work for no guarantee. When I first applied to Oxide I was also rejected and the materials process taught me a ton about myself and changed the way I viewed job searching and my work. I shifted course and increased my skills and next time I applied I got an offer. There's power in the critical thinking and writing the materials force out of us.
- guywithahat 1y agoThe company leadership of oxide concerns me. My biggest mistakes in my (not successful) startup were when I got distracted and chased politics or some corporate goal instead of solving my customers real problems. Giving all employees the same pay or advertising social media links to small, political sites makes me worried they've taken the 100 million and are about to crowd the market with a product that's not focused on solving customer problems
- cdaringe 1y agoWhat observations have you made that they are not or would not be focused on solving customer problems?
- guywithahat 1y agoThat they're instead focused on standardizing employee salary, or promoting their company through niche political websites. These are decisions that the CEO is making, which means they're distracted. This is fine when you've received nearly 200 million in total funding, but won't work once you're expected to add the same level of value while being profitable.
- steveklabnik 1y ago> promoting their company through niche political websites. Just to be clear, you mean that we have a BlueSky account, in addition to X? I struggle to think of what you mean. Generally speaking, advertising on a wide array of platforms is considered a good thing, as you reach different audiences.
- guywithahat 1y agoOnly your bluesky is listed on your website, which is what people see when they go to your site. This feels the same as past startups where I thought I hit a pmf because of how excited "potential" customers got when I mentioned politics. We built out "political" features, came back, and none of them converted but the excitement grew stronger. Politics is a trap because it adds no value, drives away potential real customer bases, but you will get enormous positive reinforcement because people are excited you're pushing their brand of politics. In my mind, there's a risk you start creating teams to manage "corporate culture" and brand outreach, and if politics sneaks into management they'll actively steer the company in the wrong direction. Also I'm sorry, if you're actually an executive at oxide I don't mean to be harsh, I thought I was speaking into the void. I've witnessed this destroy companies I've worked on and been involved with, and doing something like only listing a bluesky account is exactly the kind of thing that's a distraction which costs potential real customers.
- whalesalad 1y agoI would really love to run their control plane in my homelab.
- mkeeter 1y agoI'm not aware of folks outside the company running the whole control plane, but people have definitely gotten parts of the system running at home: https://artemis.sh/2022/03/14/propolis-oxide-at-home-pt1.html https://artemis.sh/2022/03/14/propolis-oxide-at-home-pt1.htm... (The author of this blog post now works for Oxide!)
- jefurii 1y agoHow much of the software stack is even possible to run without the specialized hardware? I'd also really like to try that control plane..
- yankcrime 1y agoCongrats to the Oxide folks, like a lot of others I'm rooting for you.
- lawik 1y agoI love following their adventures. Glad to see that it continues.
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- piker 1y agoAside from the actual product, On the Metal / Oxide and Friends are really great podcasts that manage to make programming topics entertaining and educational. Bryan Cantrill is wildly entertaining and knowledgeable at the same time. His co-hosts and guests are great, too, and I attribute a lot of that to feeding off of his energy and storytelling. Highly recommend, especially for Rust folks.
- louwrentius 1y agoThey got $100M from USIT, which seems to be owned by Thomas Tull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tull
- azemetre 1y agoAlways happy to see Oxide Computer succeeding. As others have mention their podcast is truly great and their productive is quite innovative in the space. With this news I hope they plan on expanding hiring for frontend devs soon, would love to work with such leadership once in my life.
- stego-tech 1y agoCongrats to Oxide on this milestone! I’ve been following their progress since discovering them in COVID, and would love to see them shake up what’s presently a stagnant marketplace with their product line. The idea of deploying a rack of kit on-prem that’s tightly integrated instead of wrangling multiple vendors of discrete components has a strong appeal, and while the proprietary hardware stuff did initially give me pause, their commitment to building atop Open Source quelled any lingering doubts I had. Would love to see their growth result in more versatile options, like quarter-rack or industrial deployments someday. In the meantime, congrats on the successful fundraising!
- brianzelip 1y agoLove the blog post with a one-off art direction! Also love the Oxide and Friends podcast! What strikes me most lately about Oxide since falling into their hefty episode backlog, is their book club culture. I really appreciate the ability to get a fly on the wall experience of it, I learn a lot! https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/ https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
- renewiltord 1y agoThey're a cool team and I like the idea so I hope it works. In our case, for the few million, we could get a hell of a lot more hardware (Epyc 9654 based machines to start with - much better operating cost / compute) so the magic must be in the software.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoThere is so much more than just slapping servers in racks when you reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in server hardware. Good control plane software makes a night and day difference.
- renewiltord 1y agoAdmittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of thousands of cores. We almost certainly left a lot of stuff on the table, though. Also, is your username something interesting? It feels familiar but a quick `echo -n '' | md5sum` didn't yield anything.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoIt's a random sequence.
- renewiltord 1y agoI suppose I must just have seen you post here before and that's why it's familiar. Funny, felt so familiar.
- steveklabnik 1y agoIt is true that because we're a young company, we currently have the initial SKU that we started selling two years ago. Like every hardware company, we'll be releasing new products with new hardware every so often. Totally hear you if the current product doesn't fit your needs though, that's just going to be the case when we're so young, but as we grow and scale, we'll be able to release more variations that could make sense for more people.
- ang_cire 1y agoGood for them! I used to walk my dog past their (office? warehouse?) in Emeryville, and when the weather was warm they'd have the doors open and the giant server stacks just sitting there, looking awesome. I guess it's not really a concern that someone will steal something that looks like it'd take a forklift to move. The ultimate aspirational homelab setup, ngl.
- manquer 1y agoVandalism / sabotage would still be a concern even if theft isn’t ?
- ang_cire 1y agoHonestly, not particularly. That area is really chill. It's literally across the street from Pixar's headquarters, and a block or so down from city hall. Utility outages are probably the biggest 'issue' in that neighborhood; we had power outages not infrequently, and this week they had their water main burst and shut down half the businesses nearby.
- 7e 1y agoInvestors are likely betting there is an AI play buried deeply in here somewhere. The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything successful on their own. I predict this company will be another zombie.
- checker659 1y agoI predict not. There.
- panick21_ 1y ago> never done anything successful on their own I would love to know what you consider success then ...
- revskill 1y agoI don't understand what this is after reading the homepage.
- cestith 1y agoA few years ago The Register described it as a rack-sized blade chassis with hardware, firmware, and software designed in-house together. It’s a 7-foot tall rack with compute sleds, storage sleds, and network sleds. It has its own BMC design, its own power design, its own physical connectivity design, its own virtual networking design, its own hypervisor (although it’s based on Bhyve), its own OS (although it’s based on Illumos), and its own API to spin things up and configure them. As I think of it, it’s basically a private cloud in a box and The Register wasn’t far off.
- steveklabnik 1y agoYou buy a rack of servers from us. You wheel it into a data center, plug in power and internet, turn it on. You now have a cloud in a box that you can spin up virtual machines in. That's the high level, happy to elaborate if you have more questions.
- fsckboy 1y ago>Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing just want to give a shout out to my old boss from the mid 80's who had researched it (mgt consultant) and told me at that time that cloud computing was the future of all computing because the economics were inescapable. RIP.
- breatheoften 1y agoI predict that if they take this same philosophy and use this money to add some new pieces on top where those new pieces are 'open' in the same way as their current hardware stack but which allows them to also run 'gpu bound' workloads well -- then I suspect they will make a ton of money.
- anomaloustho 1y agoIf I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so? It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales. The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.
- steveklabnik 1y ago> If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so? https://oxide.computer/remote-access https://oxide.computer/remote-access > It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales. Since we sell half or full racks at a time, it's true that we're geared towards larger companies, as small shops just don't need that much computer. > The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement. That's the use case, yep!
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- LeoPanthera 1y agoI know that this isn't their mission so I'm not really complaining, but man, if they ever start to offer smaller homelab-scale stuff, they can have all my money.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoOne POV is their model doesn’t work for small purchases period. It’s not so much a hardware or software vendor so much as an IT agency. Which can be good venture businesses! Of course, everyone looking at this problem thinks, to make a small cost offering: that’s what a cloud is. Oxide’s problem statement says something like AWS doesn’t “make sense.” It makes way more sense than Oxide. The problem with AWS isn’t that it is bad, it’s that Amazon is greedy.
- derangedHorse 1y agoAfter scrolling the site for 5 minutes, I still don't understand what they do. Do they offer on-prem servers? Then how does it bring cloud scalability? Is their selling point modular computer components so that you can order things online to achieve cloud scalability? Whatever it is, I expect it to have a poor user experience if I can't find a simple 'about' page.
- steveklabnik 1y ago> Do they offer on-prem servers? Yes. > Then how does it bring cloud scalability? You buy an entire (or half) rack at a time, and then can treat the entire thing as one elastic pool of resources, you do not need to manage the individual sleds within the server yourself. Your interface to the rack is similar to a VPS provider, it's "give me a new vm with these specs." Happy to elaborate if you have more questions.
- ksec 1y agoI am wondering what they have on Roadmap and if Zen 6 will come. Their AMD EPYC™ 7713P is 4+ years old already. Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it? In 2027 - 2030, We will have 256 Core Zen 7 CPU with PCIe 6.0 or 7.0 SSD and Network. If Liquid Cooling ever come to Oxide we are looking at 5 - 10x the compute power of its current hardware. Somewhere along the line a Single Oxide Rack would offer enough Compute and Storage for 95% of customers. And whenever I think about having Solaris in every rack just put a smile on my face.
- wmf 1y agoThey've been working on Zen 5 Turin for a while so hopefully soon they'll only be 1 year behind.
- steveklabnik 1y ago> Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it? It's more of that we're a young company, so we can only do so much, so quickly. Plus, because we do so much custom work, that all takes time. As we grow and scale up, we'll be able to move forward more quickly on updates on the hardware front.
- jeron 1y agoat any rate, I'm looking forward to decommissioned Oxide racks making it into my homelab for pennies on the dollar
- sailfast 1y agoIs this a government run VC firm? Next gen In-Q-Tel? Makes sense for highly classified workloads on-prem and there’s a lot of demand for that. Could be a need for unclassified workloads also… but curious if this is a defense and Intel community venture fund backing this next round with my tax dollars.
- tgtweak 1y agoLikely government-adjacent and with high portfolio use case match. These orgs are less and less keen on shifting sensitive workloads to public clouds - even "gov clouds". Let's not forget that the best access control is to have no access, and that obscurity is actually a form of security especially in a world where effort put on vulnerability searching is proportionate to popularity. The odds of someone discovering and exploiting your obscurely coded and privately hosted oxide stack are orders of magnitude smaller than someone compromising your public cloud. USIT > U.S. Innovative Technology (“USIT”) is an investment firm that backs growth-stage commercial companies with critical technologies relevant to the national interest, including, artificial intelligence, future of compute, new industry, space & communications, bio & healthcare, and defense tech. USIT was founded by American technologist and visionary investor Thomas Tull. joined by: Riot Ventures, Eclipse, Jane Street
- tgtweak 1y agoI can tell Bryan wrote this by the vocabulary... Congrats on the traction - haven't had a use case for rack-scale infra yet but hopefully soon!
- uberdru 1y agoI always believed in Bryan, but the day i heard the buzzword "cloud repatriation", I know there was a market.
- jiveturkey 1y ago> We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing. In exchange for your own hardware purchase cost, in practical terms also a license. > We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party. In exchange for an unbreakable dependency on the first-party solution. I'm being overly aggressive because I do lurve your product and the Sun/Apple way of vertical integration is especially valuable for security ... things break at the interfaces and since you have absolute control over that, you can be actually good. Then there's the improved UX that comes with an integrated product. The root of trust work you've done is especially noteworthy, in a sea of also especially noteworthy efforts across the entire vertical product. But I'm leery that with the absolute lock-in, and VC pressure, you might succumb to squeezing your customers a la AVGO.
- macgillicu 1y agoThis is great. I hope they stay committed to the open source side of things, but all evidence seems to suggest they're serious about it. Generally, it's great to see a good idea getting executed well and arguably improving the state of affairs in computing, and making it, as it were. The flat salary structure at a generous level (from my perspective, anyway) is a breath of fresh air. Everyone getting caught up on the equity is a bit hard to understand, given the clarity of the message from the company. I will be applying for one of the open positions. Kudos to this company for their approach to business, and congrats on the success.
- mkoubaa 1y agoIn the end, the mainframe wins
- panick21_ 1y agoTheir product isn't at all like a mainframe.
- zozbot234 1y agoTheir MVP is of course lacking the reliability and availability features of mainframes. But future products will probably improve on this POV and intrude into the existing mainframe space.
- panick21_ 1y agoThe reliability and availability is kind of what makes it a mainframe. That and that you can partition machines on low level. Neither of those this product does. Do you have some kind of insight on their future product roadmap? As far as I know their next version will just be a new sled into the existing cubby. It also uses commodity processors and is open software. Totally unlike what we typically associate with mainframes. So really its not like a mainframe in any aspect other then its not a PC architecture. Its much more like the machines that people like Google or Facebook use.
- hinkley 1y agoBig bump up in open positions now. Unfortunately none I'm particularly attuned for.
- mmeto 1y agoCongrats!
- purpleidea 1y agoBuilding sovereign systems management with low overhead is an incredibly important goal. For this I salute them for pursuing that path. However their mistake is that it's a hardware problem. It's actually almost entirely a software problem, modulo convincing some hardware vendors to make their ILOM/IPMI implementations not be buggy or suck. Disclosure, I work in the software automation space.
- steveklabnik 1y agoWe are doing both hardware and software. We don’t use vendor IPMI stuff, and have instead implemented our own stack for it. You’re absolutely right!
- syntheticgate 1y agoOur thesis is that it's both a hardware and software problem! Which, as steve said, is why we're doing both. We can look at designs across the whole stack, from chips chosen, FPGA implementations, hubris management and control plane software to accomplish this goal. By doing these together, we can accomplish fundamentally different designs and tighter integration than any one of those multi-company silos can even if they tried to work together.
- neumann 1y agoIs there a clear hardware upgrade path? Couldn't see it obviously on the website. The on-prem cloud is definitely the holy grail for many of us, but the justification to the capex and ongoing commitment to owning the hardware would be that it has have just as easy an upgrade path.
- sudomateo 1y agoHey! The current generation rack is compatible with the current generation compute sleds, switch, and power shelves. The next-generation compute sleds will be compatible as well. Possibly the next-generation switch but I would have to defer to my colleagues for that answer. We'll ultimately ship a next-generation rack to take advantage of changing constraints (e.g., physical form factor, power requirements) and we'll provide a mechanism for upgrading to that generation of rack as well. Likely, in the form of multi-rack connectivity to move workloads or perhaps even financial incentives to purchase the latest and greatest. I don't work on the hardware side at Oxide so I don't have further details to share. Great question!
- pyuser583 1y agoIt’s funny how we are knee deep in the next “big thing” (AI), and still haven’t made the last “big thing” (cloud computing) generally accessible. It should be trivial to create my own S3 bucket that’s stores data on my laptop. I’m really glad folks like Oxide are moving in that direction. But it seems when there’s enough money in something, openness goes out the window.
- didip 1y agoThis is the first time I learned about their differentiating factors. Pretty cool.
- danavar 1y agois this just a purchasable version of Borg? kubernetes on steroids?
- tiffanyh 1y agoI appreciate the craftsmanship of Oxide — it’s like a finely handcrafted Swiss watch. I just hope they can survive in a world dominated by relatively inexpensive, general-purpose Apple Watches.
- throwmeaway222 1y agoI remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events. So what is Oxide and why would I use that over OpenStack?
- steveklabnik 1y agoOpenStack is software. Oxide is selling hardware + software, made together. We believe that's a better approach.
- throw0101c 1y ago> I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events. Still releasing software twice a year: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack Available as open source so you can self-deploy, or go with a vendor if you want some hand-holding / support: * https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/ https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/ Perhaps they were "everywhere" when they were newer and needed to get their name out there, but nowadays they're more established and so will come up in search and such as an option for those that want to run cloud (either for their internal needs, or as the basis of a public product offering).
- suprgeek 1y agoIn the era of anything even remotely AI-adjacent raising ridiculous amount of money - and proving to vaporware - this is one raise that makes me happy. We need more of the Bryan mindset (and less of Larry) to ensure that when the AI-Enabled future shows up we have some semblance of a fair society that works for all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s