This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Oxide Computer Company is the creator of the world’s first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software, purpose built to deliver hyperscale cloud computing to on-premises data centers.
Working specifically on things like this for over a decade, this sounds like nonsense.
I mean, I know it's marketing but I'm curious what they're actually doing that's different or innovative.
I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was complaining about why every server in the rack needs a CD drive, which was the norm from Dell), because the kinds of stripped-down, super-efficient hardware designs the hyperscalers were building weren't available to the general public, so this is that: hyperscaler-like technology for people who want to own it themselves. I think the motivations for why people would want to own their own are probably a mix of financial (at a certain scale there's a tipping point and it gets cheaper), and regulatory/compliance/whatever, like if it's healthcare data, or defense, etc.
Best summary I could find from the link op posted. It gives a much more integrated and efficient experience compared to similar offerings from larger companies.
They are not wrong.
But I mean, if you go down that route as an msp you are so fucking vendor locked is not even funny.
Cobbled together HP / Cisco / juniper / VMware / dell / nutanix / whatever might not be optimal. But you can write your own systems to talk and provision to all of them.
They did at least make it open source, so you can do stuff like that if you can afford having a dev or two just learn how the source code works for a while.
A few people have had similar thoughts and deeper conversations including a few comments from their CTO can be found over on hackernews.
Thanks!
Yeah, I read that summary twice, and decided it was a lot of words to say, "We sell cloud services."
Except that they sell racks full of servers starting in the $500K ballpark. Those racks are themselves the building blocks for one’s own cloud service.
right? I guess I'm a time traveler or something , because that exact ad copy could also have described an Egenera BladeFrame in 2004 or a rack of Cisco UCS chassis, circa 2009(?).
Or the original azure stack
They built appliances that compete with something like VXrack. Their OS on switches, servers, etc. and you interact with their front-end. They spent basically 4 years writing custom firmware for and specifically selecting all of the random components on their boards. Knowing the people involved, it's another in a long line of projects like this that they've dove into and haven't made great progress on.
Best paid janitors and security guards in the business. Id suck 3 dicks at once to get paid that much for cleaning a toilet and wiping down tables.
Hyperscalar devices are fantastic for housing virtual workloads, including ends user virtual machines. Look up Nutanix for a company doing it right.
Yeah, the reason most of them can afford these salaries is their previous equity payouts at other startups they've been involved in together. They specifically under-pay employees on cash compensation, and you'll notice he specifically side-stepped the topic of equity. I bet you can imagine why.
Oxide Computer Company is the creator of
Honestly, this smells like a hoax.
I’m guessing they know have a few employees and tons of contractors.
They have real, well-known founders and have delivered real product.
This company also sponsors a really cool podcast where they talk OGs of computing. It's called "on the metal"
