Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

ddarthcloud 3 days ago 36 commentsRead Article on explorer.oxide.computer

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

83% Positive

Analyzed from 1246 words in the discussion.

Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jjice•about 1 hour ago

I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware.

Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.

I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.

EvanAnderson•21 minutes ago

Oxide certainly sounds cool. It reminds me of when I dealt with DEC gear back in the 90s. That stuff felt more like "real computers" than any of the IBM PC-derived drek I'd worked with.

I don't need to work there-- I just wish I could work with the Oxide gear in Customer engagement, too. I don't work with businesses big enough to need it, sadly. It looks so sweet.

convolvatron•about 1 hour ago

I've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :)

but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep

TZubiri•about 1 hour ago

I'd be interested in the context if you'd be willing to share.

It sounds from the outside like Oxide has an interview process that requires some low level engineering work to be delivered? Maybe I got that wrong.

convolvatron•about 1 hour ago

no, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.

thraway3837•32 minutes ago

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees.

Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. One of employees repeatedly rebutted that claim in the comments, and they did this for quite a few commenters. Was a not a good look. I doubt much has improved since then as seeing the comments below confirms the same mess.

Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.

dijit•22 minutes ago

Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before).

How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?

I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault.

How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).

jaggederest•11 minutes ago

There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice.

I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.

bradfa•7 minutes ago

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?

bradfa•13 minutes ago

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.

dcre•24 minutes ago

Source code here :)

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer

andrewl-hn•about 1 hour ago

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!

bri3d•37 minutes ago

> 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.

Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here.

Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example).

What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.

baby_souffle•33 minutes ago

> 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

fred_is_fred•6 minutes ago

> 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.

wmf•43 minutes ago

The vendors did make blades in the 2000s.

creaturemachine•9 minutes ago

I thought surely this isn't just blade servers, that those compute shelves were full of GPUs or something novel, but no just blades reincarnated. I used to support HP's baby version of this, the c3000.

jeffbee•24 minutes ago

Also, a big cabinet into which you plug varying amounts of hardware capacity, then use the control plane to partition into various virtual resources, describes at least at the conceptual level IBM going back decades.

manwithopinions•28 minutes ago

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.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade

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

kevinrineer•7 minutes ago

I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.

girfan•16 minutes ago

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?

Kostic•22 minutes ago

A very beautiful website and a machine. Oxide folks should be proud, you can see the love that went into it.

dralley•42 minutes ago

It's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.

dorongrinstein•about 1 hour ago

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.

PoignardAzur•about 1 hour ago

The screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.

benjaminleonard•19 minutes ago

Any console errors? Perhaps drop an issue on the repo if you have a moment: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues

arjie•about 1 hour ago

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.

burnrate•about 2 hours ago

I wonder how much a rack like this costs

LoganDark•about 1 hour ago

IIRC I heard that a single rack is upwards of $600k–$1m, but that was before the AI boom/crisis.

TZubiri•about 1 hour ago

I don't recall if the price was confidential, but I will say that it's higher than that, and that it has been influenced by the RAM cost increase.

If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.

jeffbee•about 1 hour ago

With only 288 128GiB DDR5 ECC DIMMs? I'm sure that doesn't cost much.

joshAg•32 minutes ago

may the Sun never set

DiabloD3•about 2 hours ago

Thats neat.

RobLach•about 2 hours ago

Neat